iliillBiji  ii!li!lilll! 


i  illiiiiiiiili'iiiililPi 


HE  ANATOMY 
i  SOCIETY 


r  Gilbert  Caiman 


^^  ^ 


L, 
THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 


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THE  ANATOMY  OF 
SOCIETY 


BY 

GILBERT  CANNAN 

author  of 
*'bouhd  thb  cobvkb,"   "thb  stucco  house,"  "mendbl,"  etc. 


NEW  YORK 

E.  P.  DUTTON  &  COMPANY 

681  FIFTH  AVENUE 


COPTBIGHT,    1919,   BT 
E.    P.    DUTTON   A   CO. 


All  rights  m 


Printed  In  the  United  States  of  America 


CONTENTS 


PAGB 

I.      DEFlNITIONa 1 

II.      HUMANITY 25 

III.  THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT 49 

IV.  PATRIARCHALISM 67 

V.      MARRIAGE 87 

VI.      WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS 107 

VII.      SCIENCE  AND  ART 131 

VIII.      SOCIAL  STRUCTURE 151 

IX.      BAST  AND  WEST 177 

X.      DEMOCRACY 199 


437.1  So 


I 

DEFINITIONS 


:: 


I 

DEFINITIONS 

As  it  has  been  the  grim  privilege  of  those 
who  have  eyes  to  see  to  behold  human  life 
flayed  by  the  tragedy  of  the  European  War 
of  1914-18,  it  is  no  less  than  their  duty  to  set 
down  what  they  have  seen  for  those  who  shall 
come  after  them,  that  they  may  provide  for 
their  tragedies  not  to  be  as  futile  and  sterile 
as  this  has  been.  Properly  instructed,  they 
should  be  able  to  protect  themselves  against 
the  operation  of  theories  so  antiquated  that 
they  have  lost  all  relation  to  the  common  prac- 
tice of  human  existence. 

It  is  the  aim  of  the  writer  to  avoid  as  far 
as  possible  the  ideal  theories  which  govern  to 
so  large  an  extent  the  efforts  of  revolution- 
aries, and  to  discover  what,  in  fact,  the  organ- 
isation of  society  is,  where  it  fails,  and  why  it 
produces  that  feeling  of  helplessness  in  reac- 
tion against  which  men  hurl  themselves  in  the 

3 


4.  ....  .THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

vain  efforts  of  war  and  revolution,  both  of 
which  apparently  do  but  aggravate  injustice 
and  increase  the  inertia  to  which  most  social 
calamities  can  be  traced. 

There  are  times  when  young  men  must  at- 
tempt to  say  what  old  men  cannot  think,  and 
this  is  one  of  them.  For  old  men  ideas  be- 
come words,  and  only  those  ideas  are  valid  as 
a  motive  force  for  a  change  of  spirit,  which 
have  not  yet  found  expression,  and  are  still 
part  of  thaJt  mysterious  being  in  humanity 
wliich  ahnost  unperceptibly  produces  the  vari- 
ations of  habit  whereby  progress  is  made. 

The  tragedy  through  which  we  have  passed 
has  made  us  for  a  little  while  conscious  of  be- 
ing human,  and  the  fate  of  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury depends  upon  our  having  the  force  neces- 
sary to  maintain  that  consciousness  long 
enough  to  undo  the  harm  wrought  by  the  con- 
ventionalism of  the  nineteenth  century.  Fun- 
damentally, men,  and  the  institutions  by 
which  they  live,  do  not  and  cannot  change. 
What  can  and  must  be  altered  is  the  rela- 
tionship between  men  and  their  institutions, 
and  the  change  can  best  be  wrought  by  defini- 
tion. That  is  not  so  simple,  because  human 
indolence  has  been  such  that  thought  has  be- 


DEFINITIONS  5 

come  painful,  and  the  development  of  social 
machinery  has  reached  such  a  pitch  that  life 
on  its  material  side  can  be  hved  without 
thought.  On  the  other  hand,  without  thought, 
life  on  its  spiritual  side  remains  stagnant  and 
the  profoundest  need  of  human  nature  turns 
into  a  bitter  dissatisfaction.  Hence  the  false 
exaltation  with  which  great  calamities  are 
greeted,  and  hence,  also,  the  acute  disappoint- 
ment which  follows  when  those  calamities  are 
revealed  as  calamities  and  nothing  more.  Such 
disappointment  is  followed  by  a  sullen  creep- 
ing back  into  old  habits,  and  a  dull  and  scep- 
tical refusal  to  believe  in  the  promises  of  re- 
ligion and  art,  both  of  which  have  reiterated 
"The  kingdom  of  God  is  within  you"  to  men 
who,  captive  in  their  institutions,  have  looked 
to  them  to  realise  both  the  kingdom  and  the 
truth  of  the  saying.  The  Church,  the  State, 
the  family,  have  all  promised  realisation,  but 
all  have  only  estabhshed  tyranny  because  the 
unthinking  mind  has  accepted  them  and  not 
the  truth  they  promised  as  objects  of  worship. 
It  is  only  when  the  mind  begins  to  see  the  vis- 
ible as  a  symbol  of  the  invisible  that  it  can  per- 
ceive truth  at  all.  The  science  to  which  the 
honest  endeavour  of  the  nineteenth  century 


6  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

was  given  was  a  testing  of  symbols,  so  many 
of  which  have  been  proved  worthless  as  to 
induce  the  despair  upon  which  disaster  could 
creep  with  full  warning  but  unresisted,  rather 
welcomed.  Without  worship  the  human  mind 
cannot  endure  its  own  success.  Self -worship 
it  loathes  as  the  most  potent  deterrent  upon  its 
activity.  If  the  worsliip  of  human  nature  is 
directed  upon  unworthy  symbols  it  will,  in 
time,  so  heartily  detest  them  that  it  will  ac- 
cept any  means,  however  vile,  of  destroying 
them. 

It  is  easier  to  destroy  than  to  build,  and, 
therefore,  men  are  joined  together  most  easily 
for  purposes  of  destruction,  and  it  is  such  pur- 
poses that  dominate  the  existing  social  ma- 
chinery out  of  which  the  attempt  is  now  being 
made  to  evolve  some  kind  of  international  or- 
ganisation. These  purposes  are  more  awful 
than  worshipful,  but,  for  lack  of  definition, 
none  others  are  forthcoming,  and  it  is  sought 
to  restore  order  to  the  present  chaos  by  creat- 
ing an  international  destructive  force  which 
shall  be  irresistible.  Such  a  force  can  only  be 
valid  if  the  human  capacity  for  worship  is  di- 
rected upon  it;  but  such  a  force  can  only  be 
detestable  to  that  capacity,  and  in  the  end 


DEFINITIONS  J 

means  will  be  found  to  destroy  it.  Such  means 
are  already  being  discussed  by  those  who  look 
to  syndicalism  violently  to  repair  the  injustice 
that  violence  has  produced  through  the  ages. 

We  have  to  begin  at  the  beginning,  and  to 
attempt  to  achieve  by  taking  thought  what 
material  and  mechanical  organisation  has 
failed  to  do.  Denunciation  helps  no  one,  and 
bitterness  is  barren.  The  machinery  which 
feeds  and  clothes  the  many  is  in  the  hands  of 
the  few,  who,  carried  by  the  impetus  of  ancient 
tradition,  see  the  advantage  of  all  in  their  own. 
The  unthinking  revolt  of  the  many  disquiets 
but  does  not  enlighten  them  who  think  it  right 
to  do  what  they  have  the  power  to  do. 

This  introduces  the  vital  question:  By  what 
authority? 

The  hastiest  examination  of  the  social  prob- 
lem reveals  the  fact  that  ancient  authority  is 
broken.  The  symbols  by  which  it  ruled  have 
been  tested  and  found  worthless.  In  old  times 
the  few  and  the  many  were  agreed  that  there 
was  a  God  from  Whom  all  blessings  and  all 
evils  flowed.  As  to  the  nature  and  existence 
of  God  there  were  schisms  and  divisions,  but 
this  direct  and  controlling  interest  in  the  af- 
fairs of  men  was  not  disputed.     That  God 


8  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

could  move  in  a  more  mysterious  way  than 
men  could  imagine  was  not  suspected.  Those 
customs  which  survived  from  age  to  age  were 
held  to  have  His  blessing,  and  those  powers 
which  could  sustain  themselves  were  accepted 
as  having  His  authority,  so  much  so,  indeed, 
that  the  means  of  sustaining  power,  which  do 
not  vary  from  age  to  age,  were  never  ques- 
tioned until  increasing  knowledge  forced  upon 
men  the  need  for  definition.  Then  began — 
after  Gahleo  and  his  revelation  of  the  compar- 
ative unimportance  of  Man — the  slow  disinte- 
gration of  human  institutions  which  has 
reached  its  tragic  climax  at  the  beginning  of 
the  twentieth  century.  As  this  disintegration 
has  proceeded,  men,  merely  to  live  from  day  to 
day,  have  been  forced  back  upon  money,  the 
symbol  of  work  done,  and,  as  that  also  has 
been  consumed,  upon  credit,  and  finally  upon 
labour.  The  organisation  of  credit  has  suf- 
ficed to  pull  humanity  through  its  final  trag- 
edy, but,  as  that  collapses,  we  shall  have  to 
fall  back  upon  the  organisation  of  labour, 
which  is  practically  non-existent  and  cannot 
come  into  being  until  authority  is  restored  to 
its  place  in  the  himian  mind. 

In  the  first  place,  let  it  be  agreed  that  it  is 


DEFINITIONS  9 

not  enough  for  humanity  collectively  to  live 
from  day  to  day.  The  individual  sustained 
by  the  organised  work  of  humanity,  in  which 
he  plays  so  infinitesimal  a  part,  can  do  that 
for  the  brief  period  of  his  years,  but  humanity, 
whose  existence  is  incalculable,  cannot,  be- 
cause that  existence  is  sustained  by  the  awful 
processes  of  the  universe.  The  individual  liv- 
ing from  day  to  day  exists  in  the  bubble  of  his 
own  egoism,  and  until  now  humanity  has  emu- 
lated that  pathetic  example,  being  misled  by 
the  long  line  of  egoists  who  have  been  set  up 
as  kings,  princes  and  governors.  Throiugli 
these  egoists  it  has  been  attempted  to  set  up 
an  authority  supported  by  taboos,  conventions 
and  superstitions,  all  of  which  have  been  swept 
away  by  the  intellectual  effort  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  which  proved  that  men  were 
not  governed  by  authority  but  by  economic 
power  which  has  never  yet  been  alTied  with 
justice.  The  development  of  machinery  in- 
creased economic  power  an  hundredfold,  until 
its  influence  was  felt  and  recognised  in  every 
household,  and  the  lack  of  justice  in  its  em- 
ployment has  brought  bitterness  and  despair 
into  the  great  majority  of  human  lives. 

In  that  realisation  the  European  War  has 


10  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

been  only  an  incident  in  which  a  certain 
amount  of  social  machinery  has  been  scrapped. 
The  top-hamper  of  society  has  been  bloAvn 
away  and  left  in  ruins  in  the  mud  of  Flanders 
and  Poland,  the  two  cockpits  in  which  the  Eu- 
ropeans are  accustomed  to  wrestle  with  their 
discomforts.  We  are  not  here  concerned  with 
the  war,  but  with  those  great  movements  of 
the  human  spirit  which  are  discernible  through 
the  smoke-clouds  of  the  ruins  it  has  left.  Nor 
are  we  concerned  with  the  League  of  Nations 
or  Bolshevism  or  Socialism,  or  any  of  the 
catch-phrases  with  which  modern  men  and 
women  are  accustomed  to  avoid  the  travail  of 
thought.  Our  business  is  to  discover,  if  we 
can,  the  large  facts  upon  which  thought  must 
be  based,  and  from  them  to  set  our  minds 
working,  if  only  to  encourage  mental  activity, 
the  only  means  by  which  the  many  can  discon- 
cert the  few,  with  whom  our  quarrel  is,  not 
that  they  are  few  but  that  they  are  the  wrong 
few.  The  fatal  flaw  of  the  present  organisa- 
tion of  society  is  that  it  raises  into  positions  of 
control  the  wrong  type  of  mind,  and  where 
foresight  and  imagination  are  needed  provides 
cupidity,  cunning,  a  narrow  traditionalism, 
and  in  a  dangerous  and  terrible  world  a  mean 


DEFINITIONS  11 

hunger  for  safety,  to  be  procured  with  the 
minimum  of  risk.  This  produces  the  curious 
inversion  whereby  property  is  regarded  as  of 
more  value  than  life.  It  is  time,  of  course,  that 
the  accumulation  of  work  done  must  be  jeal- 
ously safeguarded  to  facihtate  the  doing  of 
work  in  the  future,  but  at  least  an  equal  care 
should  be  taken  for  those  who  are  to  do  the 
work.  The  airiest  and  most  Utopian  schemes 
to  procure  security  cannot  do  away  with  the 
fact  that  there  will  always  be  rough  and  dirty 
work  to  be  done  in  the  world.  The  question 
is :  Need  those  who  do  that  work  be  so  rough 
and  dirty  as  to  induce  a  habit  of  mind  which 
regards  them  as  of  no  account?  There  lies 
the  rub,  and  no  tinkering  with  the  superstruc- 
ture of  society  can  alter  it.  In  pohtical  think- 
ing it  is  usually  forgotten,  even  by  men  like 
Cobden  and  Bright,  and  it  needs  a  Lassalle, 
a  Marx,  a  Cobbett  to  bring  it  home.  Human- 
ity is  one,  and  an  injury  to  one  member  is  an 
injury  to  the  whole.  We  have  travelled  far 
since  it  was  admitted  that  the  peasant  de- 
scribed so  terribly  by  La  Bruyere  was  also  a 
human  being,  but  we  have  not  yet  so  arranged 
matters  that  he  can  live  a  human  life;  and  his 
slow  loss  of  humanity  as  he  drags  through  ex- 


12  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

istence  is  a  dead  weight  upon  the  advancement 
of  the  race,  and  those  who  gather  up  the 
wealth  created  by  the  millions  of  peasants  and 
artisans  are,  by  that  also,  condemned  to  a  slow 
loss  of  humanity,  since  the  weight  they  carry 
is  too  heavy  for  human  shoulders.  That 
wealth  accumulated  about  a  Prince  could  be 
borne,  since  he  was  sustained  by  his  people, 
but,  accumulated  about  an  irresponsible  cap- 
italist, sustained  only  by  his  shareholders,  it 
becomes  as  destructive  as  the  lack  of  wealth  is 
to  those  who  labour  at  his  bidding.  Responsi- 
bility can  only  be  restored  by  the  discovery  of 
authority,  and  for  that  we  have  to  look  to  hu- 
manity, through  and  beyond  it.  That  we  have 
always  done,  but  with  eyes  only  lit  by  the  sun. 
It  is  when  the  inward  light  of  the  soul  mingles 
with  that  of  the  sun  that  the  objects  of  every 
day  can  be  seen  as  visions,  and  it  is  only  when 
things  are  so  seen  that  men  can  begin  to  speak 
the  truth  that  is  in  them.  Otherwise  they  do 
but  repeat  what  has  been  said,  or,  worse  still, 
they  say  that  which  their  hearers  wish  to  hear 
and  become  flatterers.  The  flatterers  of  a 
Prince  were  never  so  injurious  as  those  of 
what  we  are  pleased  for  the  moment  to  call 
democracy. 


DEFINITIONS  13 

The  need  of  this  time  (as  of  all  times)  is 
vision,  and  never  was  there  so  much  organised 
effort  to  crush  it  out  of  existence.  So  great  is 
this  effort  that  men  are  forced  each  in  solitude 
to  gaze  in  upon  his  own  soul,  thus  to  acquire 
a  new  bhndness  which  prevents  his  seeing  the 
great  soul  of  humanity  or  the  soul  of  the  past 
in  the  handiwork  of  his  fellows,  or  the  soul  that 
is  in  the  things  of  Nature,  birds  and  beasts, 
flowers  and  streams,  mountains  and  clouds. 
This  may  be  necessary.  A  man  must  be  aware 
of  his  own  soul  before  he  can  perceive  any 
other,  and  the  brooding  that  fills  the  world 
with  silence  may  be  the  sign  of  pregnancy.  We 
make  a  great  din,  the  noise  of  many  battles, 
the  whir  of  many  machines  thrumming  on  land 
and  sea  and  in  the  air,  to  hide  this  silence  from 
ourselves,  but  in  vain.  It  fills  our  minds  with 
awe  and  anguish.  It  is  not,  we  know,  the  si- 
lence of  that  peace  which  passes  understand- 
ing. Between  that  and  ourselves  there  should 
be, the  song  of  the  human  heart,  but  the  heart 
is  dumb  and  the  tongue  chatters  without  mean- 
ing, and  we  know,  rich  and  poor  alike,  that  our 
state  is  pitiful.  In  our  desperate  effort  to 
break  the  silence  that  oppresses  us  we  have 
thrown  away  our  superfluity  and  are  aston- 


14  THE  ANAT0IVr5f  OF  SOCIETY 

ished  that  the  ruin  we  half-desired  has  not 
come  upon  us.  We  have  wasted  young  and 
vigorous  men,  but  those  who  were  left  have 
been  able  to  do  the  necessary  work  of  the 
world,  and  only  stupidity  and  greedy  nation- 
alism inflicts  starvation  upon  certain  segre- 
gated communities.  Work  by  itself,  sacrifice 
by  itself,  cannot  then  break  the  silence.  Blind 
effort  cannot  undo  our  misery,  nor  can  those 
drugs  with  which  we  alleviate  our  misery — 
dishonest  words,  false  worship,  bad  art  and 
blatant  politics — much  longer  retain  their  po- 
tency. The  silence  before  the  storm  is  broken 
by  the  storm,  but  the  silence  which  comes  after 
it  is  broken  by  the  stirring  of  life,  the  glad 
expansion  of  leaves,  the  chirp  of  insects  in  the 
grass,  the  crisping  of  the  grass  itself,  the  de- 
lighted song  of  birds.  Such  a  stirring  must 
come  in  the  human  world  if  we  are  not  to  per- 
ish of  our  own  ingenuity.  Subtle  and  cunning 
we  may  be  to  fill  our  bellies  and  to  clothe  our 
backs,  but  to  fill  our  souls  and  to  clothe  them 
in  the  raiment  of  joy  we  have  to  be  simple, 
devout  and  thankful. 

Who,  then,  vnU  break  the  silence?  The 
teachers  of  religion  mutter  old  incantations, 
the  politicians  consult  with  the  financiers  and 


DEFINITIONS  15 

cover  their  operations  with  words,  but  only 
from  the  hearts  of  the  people  can  the  great 
song  come  for  which  the  human  soul  is  aching 
with  impatience.  But  the  people  are  divided; 
their  eyes  gaze  inward;  they  see  nothing;  they 
are  allowed  to  know  nothing.  The  impulse 
with  which  they  threw  themselves  into  the  orgy 
of  destruction  is  denied  when  it  comes  to  build- 
ing anew,  because  the  fabric  is  already  de- 
signed without  reference  to  their  wishes  or 
their  needs,  but  only  with  a  view  to  the  profit 
it  can  be  made  to  yield.  The  society  of  the 
future,  world-embracing,  has  been  designed, 
or  rather  improvised,  on  the  model  of  those 
hideous  towns  wherein  all  over  the  world  the 
song  of  the  human  heart  has  been  lost  in  the 
droning  of  machinery.  Call  it  what  you  will, 
League  of  Nations,  Society  of  Nations,  Inter- 
national, society  has  taken  shape  as  a  collec- 
tion of  nations,  each  of  which  is  a  suburb  of 
the  central  smaU  city  which  is  called  Finance. 
Life,  from  being  urban  has  become  suburban, 
and  has  lost  its  character  and  its  savour.  That 
much  every  man  can  know  from  his  own  exist- 
ence. It  is  harder  for  every  man  to  know 
what  it  is  that  is  squeezing  his  existence  dry 
and  at  the  same  tune  giving  him  no  joy  nor 


16  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

beauty  in  which  to  find  compensation  in  wor- 
ship such  as  was  vouchsafed  to  the  feudal  peas- 
ant, the  splendour  of  whose  Lord  or  King  was 
as  that  of  the  sun.  The  suburban  modern 
worker  can  find  little  to  ease  him  in  the  report 
of  the  stale  pleasures  of  the  city  of  Finance, 
which  is  given  to  him  by  his  illustrated  paper. 
He  must  begin  to  ask  what  is  done  with  his 
work  that  it  brings  him  so  little  gain,  material 
or  spiritual,  and  it  is  not  enough  for  him  to 
learn  that  his  work  is  gradually  opening  up 
oil-fields  in  Persia,  mines  in  Canada,  or  wheat- 
lands  in  Siberia.  These  names  also  have  lost 
the  magic  of  remoteness;  discovery,  even  of 
Arctic  regions,  has  become  so  cut  and  dried 
that  he  desires  new  romance,  and  turns  to  the 
Eldorado  within  himself  and  begins  to  ask 
tliat  his  daily  toil  shall  open  and  dig  out  the 
treasure  there.  Here,  he  knows,  is  the  true 
gold,  but  his  hfe  is  governed  by  men  who  can 
only  see  the  gold  that  is  dug  out  of  the  earth, 
whose  vastness  overwhelms  them  so  that  they 
are  filled  with  the  earth's  cruelty;  and  always 
when  it  comes,  as  in  every  adventure  it  does 
coflie,  to  a  choice  between  the  gold  of  the  heart 
and  the  gold  of  the  earth,  choose  the  latter.  It 
is  this  choice,  perpetually  made,  that  brings  its 


DEFINITIONS  17 

perpetual  retribution  in  which  the  innocent 
suffer  with  the  guilty.  Men  pay  for  their  greed 
in  the  stifling  of  their  song,  without  which 
everything  they  do  reacts  to  their  hurt  because 
it  is  not  well  done,  and  when  it  is  done,  as  it  is 
in  the  modern  world,  on  a  vast  scale,  it  is  hard 
to  see  whether  it  is  done  well  or  ill.  Reaction 
is  slow  and  is  spread  over  innumerable  lives, 
and  may  not  come  to  a  crisis  for  a  generation 
or  two.  Hence  the  recklessness  and  the  im- 
pudent levity  with  which,  in  the  city  of  Fi- 
nance, life  for  the  suburbs  is  ordered.  A  law 
passed  hastily  to  meet  an  emergency  breeds 
diseases  which  only  afflict  the  grandchildren 
of  those  who  make  them.  The  rich  can  secure 
themselves  against  the  physical  but  not  the 
moral  consequences,  and  if  they  can  leave  their 
children  the  gold  of  the  earth  they  are  indif- 
ferent to  the  fact  that  they  are  filching  from 
them  the  gold  of  the  heart,  which  is  the  deep- 
est and  most  subtle  offence  by  which  human 
beings  can  sin  against  humanity.  The  offence, 
like  that  of  Claudius,  is  rank  and  smeUs  to 
Heaven,  and  it  is  upon  this  that,  if  we  are  to 
restore  the  architecture  of  society,  we  must 
concentrate.  It  is  a  small  thing  that  the  few 
are  rich  and  the  many  are  poor  compared  with 


18  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

the  fact  that  all  are  poor  in  spirit,  so  poor,  in- 
deed, that  a  tragedy  like  the  war,  an  heroic 
convulsion  like  the  Russian  Revolution,  can 
leave  us  unmoved,  numbed  by  the  silence  in 
which  we  live  because  our  fathers  have  left  us 
an  inheritance  of  much  earthly  gold  and  have 
robbed  us  of  that  which  should  shine  in  our 
hearts.  They  have  built  us  a  city  of  Finance 
when  we  looked  for  a  city  of  God,  and  we  are 
ashamed  because  that  which  is  handed  on  to  us 
with  so  much  pride  arouses  in  us  no  joy,  not 
even  a  fleeting  pleasure;  a  dull  magnificence,  a 
massive  ugliness,  cannot  compensate  for  the 
lack  of  form,  colour  and  character  which  we, 
in  our  eagerness,  desire.  The  fundamental 
fact  in  the  present  crisis  in  the  evolution  of  hu- 
manity is  the  inability  of  the  young  to  accept 
the  society  which  their  elders  have  so  industri- 
ously, and  with  such  an  appalling  sacrifice  of 
life,  shaped  for  them.  It  is  not  that  they  will 
not,  but  that  they  cannot,  accept  it.  Its  form 
does  not  correspond  to  their  needs  or  their  de- 
sires. Its  conveniencles,  its  luxuries  can  be  ac- 
cepted, but  to  no  particular  purpose.  It  is 
not  enough  to  go  on  digging  out  material  and 
energy  from  this  extraordinary  planet.  The 
force  of  the  earth  may  be  tremendous,  but 


DEFINITIONS  19 

Man  is  its  most  miraculous  instrument,  its 
most  supple  and  varied;  and  society  to  be  tol- 
erable must  be  not  only  a  means  to  daily  bread, 
but  also  an  expression  as  supple  and  varied  as 
Man  himself.  Otherwise  it  becomes  so  op- 
pressive that  it  must  be  destroyed.  No  one 
wants  to  destroy  it,  but  every  one  who  is  men- 
tally alive  wants  to  overhaul  and  reshape  it 
and  to  remove  from  it  all  vestiges  of  tyranny. 
Dullness  and  ugliness  are  created  by  tyranny, 
and  we  find  ourselves  suffering  not  from  the 
tyranny  of  persons  but  from  the  tyranny  of 
systems  by  which  men  who  sacrifice  under- 
standing for  power  are  so  placed  that  their 
words  and  deeds  can  influence  the  lives  of  mil- 
lions of  their  fellows. 

It  may  be  said  that  the  stupidity  of  men  is 
such  that  they  deserve  any  system  that  they 
can  be  induced  to  create,  but  the  objection  to 
the  present  system  is  precisely  that  it  is  not 
created,  but  rather  manufactured  piecemeal, 
to  meet  the  need  of  each  day  as  it  arises,  and 
being  so  manufactured  it  denies  the  creative 
impulse  which  is  the  source  of  human  happi- 
ness. There  is  in  the  stupidest  man  the  ele- 
ment of  devotion.  Alone  he  has  not  the  cour- 
age of  it.    With  others  it  can  stir  in  him  and 


«0  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

give  him  that  joy  without  which  he  cannot 
live.  This  is  perfectly  well  known  to  those 
who  profit  by  the  existing  system,  and  they 
have  attained  an  abominable  skill  in  confusing 
this  element  of  devotion  in  simple  men  with 
prejudice  and  inflamed  passion.  Those  who 
profit  by  the  simplicity  of  human  beings  will 
not  admit  how  simple  they  are,  and  treat  them 
as  though  they  were  as  cunning  and  as  ruth- 
less as  themselves.  In  situation  after  situation 
when  the  uttered  truth  could  resolve  the  cen- 
tral difficulties  a  lie  is  told  to  create  confusion 
in  which  those  things  that  cannot  be  done 
openly  are  accomplished  in  secret.  Those  who, 
having  power,  are  trustees  for  the  people  do 
not  trust  the  people.  It  is  true  that  compli- 
cated economic  problems  cannot  be  decided  by 
the  mass  intelligence,  but  the  greater  prob- 
lems of  right  or  wrong  can  be,  and  in  the  long 
rim  always  are  so  decided.  The  trouble  is, 
that  under  existing  conditions  the  nm  is  so 
devilish  long  that  moral  decisions  are  always 
made  years,  perhaps  generations,  after  the 
event,  when  other  problems  have  arisen,  in 
turn  to  be  shelved  in  favour  of  ftiore  superfi- 
cial aspects  of  the  conditions  that  give  rise  to 
them.     For  instance,  when  British  workers. 


DEFINITIONS  21 

finding  they  cannot  marry  for  lack  of  houses, 
say  so,  they  are  asked  to  consider  the  question 
of  the  exportation  of  aliens.  Just  as  material 
problems  are  settled  by  continual  expansion 
(Imperialism),  so  moral  problems  are  dealt 
with  by  a  continual  shuffling  and  hedging.  The 
fault  lies  in  the  mentality  brought  to  bear  on 
these  matters,  and  the  mentality  is  defective 
because  the)  spirit  is  impoverished,  and  the 
spirit  is  impoverished  by  the  attempt  to  deal 
with  humanity  and  its  erratic  career  only  on 
the  basis  of  calculable  things,  leaving  out  eve- 
rything that  is  incalculable  though  discernible, 
not,  Ihoving  through  an  individual  at  all  pow- 
erful, but,  moving  through  the  mass,  irresist- 
ible. 

It  is  because  there  is  such  a  movement  in 
the  mass  that  youth,  aware  of  it,  cannot  ac- 
cept the  society  in  which  the  aged  take  their 
pride.  Great  towns,  railways,  aeroplanes,  air- 
ships, liners,  warships,  submarines,  are  all  very 
well  in  their  way,  but  the  young  men  ask,  do 
they  or  do  they  not  intensify  the  adventure  of 
life,  or  do  they  merely  enslave  millions  for  no 
particular  purpose  save  to  give  a  few  men  the 
apparent  but  fundamentally  false  pleasure  of 
efficiency  in  organising  work  on  the  grand 


22  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

scale  without  ascertaining  what  the  effects  of 
such  organisation  are,  except  those  which  are 
recorded  in  a  banker's  ledger?  When  young 
men  look  away  from  the  ledger  they  see  Man- 
chester, Pittsburg,  Johannesburg,  Newcastle, 
Essen,  Lille,  South  Wales,  Glasgow — the 
squalor  and  misery  with  which  they  are  filled, 
and  the  figures  that  so  dazzle  their  elders  have 
no  gleam  for  them.  They  are,  rather,  mean- 
ingless and  detestable,  for  they  are  only  ci- 
phers. Much  is  made,  nothing  is  created.  So- 
ciety enables  men  to  exist — ^which  they  could 
do  without  it — and  it  inliibits  their  will  to  live. 
So  powerful  has  organisation  been  to  procure 
this  unhappy  result  that  definition  becomes  an 
almost  hopelessly  difficult  task,  because  words, 
like  institutions,  have  bedn  robbed  of  their 
meaning.  To  use  words  in  their  full  sense  is 
to  create  misunderstanding,  for  they  are  only 
addressed  to  a  faint  echo  of  what  they  once 
signified.  Words,  like  men,  are  ghosts  of 
themselves,  and  not  even  ferro-concrete  has 
succeeded  in  making  human  society  solid.  Al- 
most it  would  seem  that  the  more  existence  is 
heaped  up  with  material  wealth,  the  more  fan- 
tastic and  ephemeral  it  becomes.  That  is  be- 
cause it  yields  less  to  the  spirit  in  whose  light. 


DEFINITIONS  28 

beaconing  from  generation  to  generation,  is 
the  only  permanence,  the  only  continuity,  that 
is  vouchsafed  to  us.  Kindle  the  spirit  and 
even  the  deadening  organisations  that  tick  out 
figures  in  ledgers  must  be  turned  to  the  pur- 
pose of  enlarging  and  vivifying  consciousness 
of  that  permanence  and  that  continuity. 
Kindle  the  spirit  and  we  have  a  lamp  where- 
with to  explore  the  darkness  in  which  we  are 
suffered  to  exist.  We  may  then  see  things 
as  they  really  are,  and  we  may,  seeing  even 
one  thing  clearly,  be  shocked  and  dehghted 
into  perception  of  the  intimate  relationship  of 
all  things :  for  the  truth  shines  everywhere,  be- 
ing the  light  by  which  men  and  the  universe 
have  their  transient  existence.  Without  that 
vision  we  are  driven  into  the  futility  either  of 
argument  or  of  dogma,  and  definition  will  es- 
cape us. 


II 

HUMANITY 


II 

HUMANITY 

Whatever  happens  men  and  women  must 
eat,  drink  and  breed  like  other  animals.  Their 
other  activities  depend  upon  whether  they  per- 
form these  functions  well  or  ill.  That  is  so 
obvious  as  to  be  hardly  worth  stating,  were  it 
not  that  it  is  so  obvious  as  most  often  to  es- 
cape the  notice  of  eminent  persons,  bent,  as 
eating,  drinking  and  breeding  are  made  easy 
and  pleasurable  for  them,  upon  preserving 
their  eminence.  High  ideals  are  a  luxury  as 
imintelligible  as  caviare  or  champagne  to  the 
man  or  woman  who  has  to  meet  a  three-pound 
expenditure  on  Saturday  with  twenty-nine 
shillings.  Even  when  the  newspapers  ask  him 
or  her  to  think  in  millions  (in  other  words,  to 
think  Imperially),  the  difference  between  five 
shiUings  and  half-a-crown  remains.  That  is 
one  great  cause  of  the  disastrous  split  in  hu- 
manity. Domestic  economy  is  inexorable, 
whereas  in  the  economy  of  Finance  the  dif- 

27 


28  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

ference  between  five  shillings  and  half-a-crown 
disappears.  Persons  above  a  certain  standard 
in  the  scale  of  income  adopt  the  outlook  of 
Finance,  leaving  the  rest  to  drudge  along  with 
the  dreary  outlook  dictated  by  the  domestic 
budget.  The  breach,  then,  is  not  so  much  be- 
tween poverty  and  wealth — that  might  be 
bridged — as  between  care  and  carelessness, 
two  states  of  mind  which  cannot  find  a  com- 
mon language,  and  therefore!  use  the  same 
ideas  and  words  in  different  senses.  That  this 
has  always  been  the  case  is  no  reason  why  it 
should  always  be  so,  and,  indeed,  organisation 
and  education  have  made  it  impossible  for  it 
to  continue.  The  present  tendency  is  to  in- 
duce everybody  to  forget  the  difference  be- 
tween five  shillings  and  half-a-cro\\Ti,  but  that 
diflFerence  remains  and  will  have  to  be  faced. 
There  comes  a  point  at  which  old  creditors 
cannot  be  met  by  making  new  ones.  Human- 
ity has  to  face  its  creditors.  That  is  the  dram- 
atic moment  at  which  we  have  arrived  at  the 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century.  Men  have 
tried  to  avoid  it  by  killing  each  other,  but  the 
fact  remains  that  we  have  spent  our  moral  cap- 
ital before  it  was  realised,  and  are  too  heavily 
in  debt  to  the  human  intellect  and  the  human 


HUMANITY  29 

spirit.  If  it  were  only  a  matter  of  digging 
more  wealth  out  of  the  earth  we  could  set  to 
and  dig  cheerfully  enough,  but  we  have  been 
made  aware  that  the  earth  is  a  very  small  part 
of  the  universe,  and  that  the  universe  is  gov- 
erned by  certain  principles  which  appear  in 
human  affairs  as  moral.  Roughly,  it  may  be 
said  that  every  advantage  won  by  humanity 
over  the  other  elements  of  creation  has  to  be 
paid  for  by  work.  Now,  drudgery  is  not  work. 
It  is  a  base  currency,  and  we  have  for  too  long 
paid  for  our  advantages  in  drudgery  shuffled 
over  on  to  the  shoulders  of  the  poor  and  the 
helpless. 

As  an  example  of  work  let  us  take,  as  an 
extreme  instance,  the  case  of  a  man  and  a 
woman  who  are  what  is  called  in  love.  Nature 
supplies  them  in  the  first  instance  with  tre- 
mendous energy,  electric  and  vivifying,  for 
her  own  purposes  of  reproduction.  That  en- 
ergy will  carry  them  to  a  certain  point  of 
union,  but  no  farther.  Nature's  energy  ebbs; 
its  freshness  is  dulled  by  habit,  and  without 
effort — that  is,  work,  on  the  part  of  the  lov- 
ers— that  energy  cannot  be  humanised  in  a 
really  fruitful  relationship,  because  elements 
of  mind,  character  and  sjonpathy  must  be  in- 


80  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

troduced  for  which  Nature  cares  not  a  dew- 
drop.  To  other  animals  the  ehbing  of  Na- 
ture's energy  is  a  matter  of  no  importance,  but 
to  human  beings,  who  sumve  by  the  aid  of 
combination,  it  is  tragically  essential  that  they 
should  defend  themselves  against  it,  anticipate 
it,  and  raise  their  relationship  from  the  natural 
to  the  human  level.  In  no  other  way  can  what 
is  most  precious  to  them — love — continue  to 
exist.  That  is  the  supreme  human  advantage, 
and,  like  all  the  rest,  it  has  to  be  paid  for  by 
work.  If  it  is  not  paid  for,  then  Nature  de- 
stroys it  exactly  as  she  destroys  civilisations 
that  cannot  meet  their  creditors. 

This  stniggle  exists  in  every  human  activ- 
ity. It  is  the  prime  condition  of  the  existence 
of  humanity,  and  because  it  is  not  admitted 
such  order  as  we  achieve  is  continually  being 
reduced  to  chaos.  Work  avoided,  in  however 
small  a  degree,  means  drudgery  somewhere 
for  some  one. 

Now,  the  development  and  the  abuse  of  ma- 
chinery have  given  rise  to  a  general  organised 
conspiracy  to  avoid  work.  That  conspiracy 
we  call  European  civilisation,  and  to  preserve 
it  millions  of  men  have  been  condemned  to 


HUMANITY  31 

four  years'  drudgery  in  the  trenches.  No  loud- 
sounding  words  can  make  that  right. 

No  one  expects  a  perfect  world  in  which 
drudgery  shall  everywhere  have  been  replaced 
by  work.  The  process  of  elevation  there  is  as 
slow  as  any  other  stage  of  evolution,  but  every 
man  and  woman  has  the  right  to  expect  a 
world  in  which  such  disastrous  collapses  into 
drudgery  shall  be  avoided.  Every  man  and 
woman  expects  it  and  must  work  for  it.  As 
to  the  means  by  which  that  can  be  made  pos- 
sible, we  shall  discover  them  as  we  pursue  our 
examination. 

Accept,  first  of  all,  that  work  is  right  and 
that  drudgery  is  wrong.  The  reward  of  work 
is  leisure :  the  consequence  of  drudgery  is  sloth. 
The  proof  of  the  pudding  is  in  the  eating,  and 
work  and  drudgery  can  be  defined  by  their  re- 
sults. A  human  being  who  is  really  working 
gains  energy  by  it,  up  to  a  point  defined  by 
his  natural  limitations;  he  gains  eagerness, 
pride  in  his  skill,  a  fine  perception  of  the  na- 
ture of  his  doing.  A  human  being  who  is  en- 
gaged in  drudgery  loses  perception,  keenness, 
and  is  stultified  until  he  becomes  the  mechan- 
ical creature  of  habit.  All  human  activity 
can  be  either  work  or  drudgery,  and  until  that 


32  THE  ANAtOIVIY  OF  SOCIETY 

is  understood  there  can  be  no  understanding 
of  humanity  whose  condition  depends  upon  the 
degree  to  which  the  w^orld's  drudgery  is  dom- 
inated by  the  world's  work.  At  present  it  is 
obvious  that  the  world  is  dominated  by  human 
drudgery,  which,  except  in  a  very  few  men, 
has  destroyed  the  capacity  for  work.  The  real 
problem,  then,  is  how  to  increase  that  capac- 
ity, for  it  is  the  lack  of  it  that  engenders  the 
appalling  waste  from  which  humanity  has  too 
long  suffered.  Human  life  depends  upon  hu- 
man energy,  for  which  that  extracted  from  the 
earth  is  not  an  efficient  substitute,  though  it  is 
a  necessary  complement,  just  as  tools  are  the 
necessarj^  complement  of  hands.  Machines 
are  tools  driven  by  the  energy  extracted  from 
the  earth,  but  as  they  are  too  expensive  to  be 
owned  and  maintained  by  individuals  they  are, 
as  a  rule,  maintained  and  owned  collectively, 
and  the  labour  necessary  to  run  them  is  hired 
as  cheaply  as  possible.  Hence  has  arisen  tyr- 
anny through  the  ownership  of  machines  which 
has  replaced  tyranny  through  the  ownership 
of  the  land.  It  was  a  sound  but  misguided  in- 
stinct that  made  the  operatives  of  the  early 
nineteenth  century  resist  every  new  installa- 
tion of  machinery,  because  they  knew  that 


HUMANITY  83 

ownership  of  machinery,  added  to  ownership 
of  land,  meant  an  intolerable  increase  to  their 
burden.  And  so  it  has  proved.  The  produc- 
tion of  wealth  has  been  so  enormous  that  the 
material  status  of  the  physical  worker  has  been 
improved,  but  his  moral  status  has  been  de- 
graded to  such  an  extent  that  he  cannot  be 
passionate  even  in  revolt.  If  we  compare  the 
spirit  of  the  French  Revolution  with  that  of 
the  Russian  we  cannot  but  be  struck  with  a 
weakening  of  fibre,  of  the  degree  of  force  ex- 
pressed in  the  later  convulsion,  and  it  seems 
likely  that  the  old  order  was  really  destroyed 
by  the  first  assault,  but  that  those  who  knew 
how  to  profit  by  that  order  succeeded  in  main- 
taining the  semblance  of  it,  even  while  the  new 
order  slowly  took  shape,  as  it  has  been  doing 
ever  since  in  France.  Voltaire,  Diderot  and 
Rousseau  gave  expression  to  the  new  spirit, 
or,  not  to  fight  shy  of  the  inevitable  word,  the 
new  religion.  Humanity  follows  very  slowly 
in  the  wake  of  its  leaders  of  thought,  who  are 
never  in  a  hurry,  knowing  perfectly  well  that 
great  changes  only  come  when  the  increase  in 
the  population  of  the  world  makes  existing 
economic  and  political  systems  embarrassing 
and  uncomfortable.    The  men  of  action  unf or- 


84  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

tunately  are  generally  in  a  hurry  and  anxious 
to  produce  results  for  which  they  can  be  re- 
warded. They  produce  such  results,  but  they 
are  nearly  always  disastrous,  preventing  and 
stultifying  the  ideas  which  should  guide  hu- 
manity through  its  crises,  and  even  deriding 
the  thinkers  and  visionaries  whose  will  they  are 
forced  to  carry  out. 

Humanity  has  a  will  backed  by  the  creative 
will  which  animates  the  universe.  When  the 
will  of  humanity  is  thwarted  over  long  stretch- 
es of  time  by  the  setting  up  of  false  authorities 
there  are  violent  reactions  and  readjustments, 
and  false  authorities  are  swept  away.  These 
violent  reactions  and  readjustments  are  a 
waste  of  energy  which  in  time  will  have  to  be 
obviated  in  order  to  meet  both  the  economic 
necessities  of  the  world  and  that  other  moral 
bill  which  is  now  due.  The  will  of  humanity, 
like  that  of  a  tree  or  a  flower  or  a  human  be- 
ing, is  creative  and  destroys  only  to  create. 
When  it  is  unhealthy  and  exasperated  it  de- 
stroys only  for  the  sake  of  destruction,  and 
that  neither  materially  nor  spirituaUy  can  pro- 
vide any  lasting  satisfaction,  though  there  is 
something  to  be  said  for  an  outburst  of  tem- 
per as  clearing  the  air;  but  it  is  precisely  to 


HUMANITY  35 

control  the  temper  of  humanity  that  authority 
is  needed,  for  sudden  reversions  to  a  primitive 
and  childish  state  of  mind  can  do  an  amount 
of  damage  which  it  takes  a  generation  to  re- 
store, and  a  generation  requires  to  do  more 
with  its  energy  than  repairing  the  mischief 
done  by  its  predecessors. 

As  the  prime  condition  of  human  existence 
is  work,  so  the  authority  governing  that  exist- 
ence emanates  from  work,  and  that  authority 
is  living  or  sterile,  according  as  work  is  kept 
current  or  is  impeded,  continually  ennobled  or 
degraded  to  drudgery.  Those  who  maintain 
great  state  or  power  or  mere  wealth  do  so  by 
obtaining  doles  from  the  work  of  millions.  As 
a  rule  they  obtain  these  doles  so  indirectly  that 
they  regard  them  as  coming  from  some  mys- 
terious source  as  a  reward  for  their  extraor- 
dinary merits,  or,  in  many  cases,  they  do  not 
think  about  it  at  all,  but  accept  their  fortune 
as  in  the  natural  order  of  things.  Kings  and 
priests  consider  their  ease  and  magnificence  as 
given  to  them  by  God,  while  financiers  and 
manufacturers,  who  have  succeeded  those 
functionaries  in  the  modern  organisation  of 
society,  accept  their  enormous  incomes  as  evi- 
dence of  their  capacity  for  "getting  things 


86  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

done,"  and  as  proof  that  the  things  done  need- 
ed doing.  The  structure  of  society  remains 
the  same :  doles  from  the  work  of  miUions  are 
gathered  together  into  a  source  of  power  which 
is  directed  by  persons  not  so  much  appointed 
as  agreed  to,  because  of  their  success  in  attain- 
ing a  certain  position,  to  maintain  which  they 
use  the  power  at  their  disposal  to  create  more 
power.  Blind  to  the  fact  that  this  power  em- 
anates from  work,  they  seek  to  fortify  it  with 
force  and  divert  it  from  constructive  to  de- 
structive purposes.  Kings  and  priests  had 
some  excuse  for  such  a  mistake  because  they 
believed  themselves  to  be  appointed  by  God, 
and  that  any  one  who  questioned  their  opera- 
tions was  committing  a  kind  of  blasphemy. 
But  financiers  and  manufacturers  have  no 
such  excuse,  though  it  may  be  said  for  them 
that  they  have  inherited  powers  which  they 
have  had  neither  the  training  nor  the  oppor- 
tunity to  understand.  Henrj^  V  could  awaken 
a  thrill  of  loyalty  with  the  cr}%  "God  for  Har- 
ry, England  and  St.  George!"  But  a  modern 
soapboiler  or  newspaper  proprietor,  who  has 
probably  more  power  than  King  Henry  ever 
dreamed,  can  arouse  no  such  enthusiasm,  and 
without  enthusiasm  the  greatest  power  must 


HUMANITY  37 

dwindle.  You  may  pile  up  gold,  foodstuffs, 
housing  material,  all  the  good  and  comfortable 
things  of  the  earth  for  generations,  but  there 
comes  a  point  at  which  human  nature  can  en- 
dure no  more,  and  will  sacrifice  everything  for 
a  thrill,  a  breath  freely  drawn,  a  generous  ges- 
ture. In  such  a  moment  the  mightiest  power 
will  be  shaken  to  its  foundations  and  the  eter- 
nal question  is  asked  once  more:  "By  what 
authority?" 

When  that  question  is  asked  it  has  been  the 
practice  of  governors  to  set  one  section  of 
humanity  against  another.  Divide  and  rule. 
In  old  times  all  men  were  as  simple  as  the  ex- 
Emperor  Wilhelm  II,  and  believed  that  when 
they  fought  they  fought  for  God  and  that  God 
fought  with  them.  Now  and  henceforth  that 
superstition  has  lost  its  validity.  Human  pug- 
nacity is  without  its  old  sanction,  and  if  there 
are  to  be  wars  in  future  they  will  be  a  matter 
of  frank  greed,  blood-lust  and  craving  for  ex- 
citement, of  which  a  large  proportion  of  hu- 
manity will  be  ashamed :  and  not  only  of  war, 
but  of  preparations  for  war.  They  will  ask 
why  the  doles  extracted  from  the  work  of  hu- 
manity should  be  put  to  such  a  wasteful  use, 
and  when  they  are  told  that  it  is  to  maintain 


88  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

right  against  wrong  they  will  ask  in  season 
and  out  for  definition  as  the  only  safeguard 
against  the  easily  roused  passions  of  the  crowd. 
Humanity  is  not,  or  ought  not  to  be,  a 
crowd,  and  no  section  of  it  should  be  treated 
as  such,  but  as  a  collection  of  human  beings 
entitled  to  enjoy  the  fruits  of  the  earth  and 
of  their  labour  upon  it,  and  the  leisure  in  wliich 
to  discover  in  each  other  those  joys  without 
which  human  life  is  vastly  inferior  to  that  of 
the  beasts,  or  the  bees  and  ants,  or  the  trees 
and  flowers.  Human  life  is  a  matter  of  per- 
sonal relations.  These  are  the  vital  necessity, 
and  if  they  are  degraded  for  the  sake  of  any 
other  element  that  element  is  wrong,  whatever 
may  be  the  apparent  advantages  due  to  it. 
Any  organisation  which  degrades  those  who 
participate  in  it  is  too  injurious  to  be  admissi- 
ble, and  human  society,  at  present  and  for  a 
long  time  to  come,  looks  like  being  dependent 
upon  such  organisation,  creating  power  with- 
out authority  for  the  few,  work  without  leisure 
for  the  many.  Now,  power  without  authority 
can  only  be  maintained  by  trickery  and  cun- 
ning, which,  as  the  dodges  are  revealed — and 
they  are  few  and  time-honoured — become 
more  barefaced. 


HUMANITY  S9 

European  civilisation  is  at  present  domin- 
ant in  the  affairs  of  humanity,  and  its  power 
over  other  civilisations  increases.  It  has  lost 
its  old  sanctions  and  its  old  spirit:  humanism 
is  dead,  Christianity  is  threadbare:  this  civil- 
isation persists  by  its  rapacity  and  its  mechan- 
ical power.  Its  engines,  constructive  and  de- 
structive, blast  their  way  through  the  other 
civilisations  in  the  quest  of  the  precious  raw 
materials  necessary  for  the  maintenance  of 
urban  existence.  Everywhere  they  destroy 
and  do  not  replace  old  habits,  old  religions, 
ancient  forms  of  society;  and  they  offer  noth- 
ing in  return  except  a  crude  arrangement  by 
which  the  doles  extracted  from  the  work  of 
human  beings  can  rapidly  be  accumulated  into 
a  power  directed  solely  to  the  production  of 
more  wealth  from  the  earth.  It  may  be  said 
that  these  methods  do,  on  the  whole,  increase 
the  well-being  of  the  disorganised  multitudes 
who  were  formerly  scratching  a  meagre  living 
from  inhospitable  tracts  of  the  world,  but  it 
is  incontestable  that  the  violence  with  which 
millions  of  men  and  women  have  been  uproot- 
ed from  their  traditional  existence  has  pro- 
duced a  blight  which  is  probably  the  greatest 
affliction  from  which  humanity  has  ever  suf- 


40  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

fered.  It  has  forced  upon  men  and  women 
everywhere  a  consciousness  for  which  they  have 
no  equipment,  so  that  they  Uve  in  an  increas- 
ing pain  and  are  isolated  as  they  never  were 
from  each  other.  The  result  bears  a  superfi- 
cial resemblance  to  decadence,  but  it  is  rather 
a  paralysis  of  stagnation,  almost  a  fear  of  the 
new  mode  of  living  that  has  become  necessary, 
combined  with  a  fatalistic  fore-knowledge  that 
European  civilisation,  in  attempting  to  con- 
quer humanity,  will  be  absorbed  by  it. 

What  is  happening  is  this:  European  civ- 
ilisation is  attempting  to  conquer  the  earth  for 
the  benefit  of  the  Europeans,  or  rather  of  the 
comparative  few  who  possess  economic  power, 
and  is  doing  so  without  the  slightest  regard 
for  humanity.  The  better  to  achieve  this  pur- 
pose it  was  necessary  to  dispose  of  the  insur- 
gent elements  in  the  European  populations, 
who  were  accordingly  turned  against  each  oth- 
er in  the  war  of  1914-18,  which  effectively  dis- 
posed of  the  chances  of  a  proletarian  interna- 
tionalism intruding  upon  the  internationalism 
of  the  economically  powerful,  bent  on  estab- 
lishing control  of  raw  materials.  The  war, 
then,  has  been  only  an  element  in  the  long 
struggle  between  those  whose  aim  is  to  control 


HUMANITY  41 

raw  materials,  and  those  whose  aim  is  to  con- 
trol labour.  In  this  struggle  humanity  is  not 
considered  at  all,  because  each  side  is  con- 
sumed with  dread  of  the  other.  It  is  not  a 
conflict  between  autocracy  and  democracy  in 
the  old  political  sense,  for  politics  are  very  re- 
mote from  facts.  The  conflict  is  between  au- 
tocracy and  democacy  in  the  industrial  sense, 
and  the  battle  is  in  the  industrial  field.  Until 
it  is  fought  out  there  will  not  be  much  room 
for  the  normal  healthy  activities  which  make 
the  sum  of  human  happiness,  and  the  race  will 
live  an  uneasy,  distracted  and  dissatisfied  ex- 
istence. Raw  materials  are  necessary,  labour 
is  necessary.  Out  of  these  two  have  grown 
two  conflicting  interests  whose  wrangling  day 
by  day  destroys  human  hopes  and  increases 
that  despair  to  which  the  greater  part  of  the 
men  and  women  of  the  century  have  been  re- 
duced. It  is  an  old  quarrel  arising  from  the 
denial  of  the  right  of  him  who  works  to  have 
a  voice  in  the  direction  of  the  dole  which  is 
taken  from  his  work  for  social  purposes,  and 
until  that  right  is  established  the  quarrel  can- 
not be  resolved.  To  this  must  be  added  the 
denial  of  social  purposes  as  meaning  the  pur- 
poses of  humanity,  though  that  has  grown  out 


42  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

of,  rather  than  contributed  to,  the  quarrel,  the 
two  parties  to  which  are  blinded  by  the  diver- 
sion of  their  energies  from  their  work  to  their 
feud. 

As  the  struggle  grows  in  intensity  old  con- 
ceptions are  destroyed,  indolence  becomes 
more  and  more  impossible,  and  we  are  slowly 
forced  to  take  a  simple  view  both  of  ourselves 
and  of  our  situation.  Millions  have  died  and 
are  dying  of  violence  or  neglect,  and  such 
death  has  its  inevitable  reaction  upon  life — 
poisonous,  stultifying",  enervating;  and  that 
burden,  unlike  the  material  load,  cannot  be 
passed  on  to  the  poor.  Increased  production 
is  not  a  sufficient  antidote  to  a  moral  infec- 
tion, for  under  the  present  social  system  it 
would  simply  mean  a  vaster  accumulation  of 
the  doles  taken  from  work  done  to  be  spent  on 
the  purchase  of  raw  materials.  It  is  not  enough 
to  cry  out  against  an  exploiting  class:  human- 
ity is  exploiting  humanity,  and  until  the  social 
system  is  amended  cannot  help  doing  sa 

The  evil  has  grown  out  of  the  fear  of  pov- 
erty: not  merely  of  the  discomfort,  but  even 
more  of  the  inertia  that  poverty  brings.  If  a 
man  must  endure  squalor,  dirt,  vermin,  lack 
of  privacy,  and  gnawing  anxiety  from  week 


HUMANITY  4S 

to  week,  he  cannot  but  lose  his  self-respect, 
and  with  that  gone,  there  is  no  hope  of  his 
achieving  pride  of  work  without  which  his  ex- 
istence is  savourless.  His  manhood  is  dissi- 
pated and  he  becomes  the  drudge  of  his  fam- 
ily, of  his  own  enfeebled  appetites,  of  those 
who  employ  him  for  as  little  as  he  can  be  got 
to  accept.  Small  wonder,  then,  that  from  this 
horror  men  struggle  to  escape,  but  they  do  not 
escape  if  their  efforts  are  directed  to  thrusting 
others  down  into  it.  For  men  are  more  than 
brothers:  they  are  all  parts  of  one  soul,  and 
the  suffering  of  any  portion  of  it  affects  the 
whole. 

The  survival  of  the  fittest  was  a  phrase  ap- 
plied to  species :  humanity  as  a  whole  may  take 
pride  in  its  survival,  but  every  part  of  human- 
ity owes  its  existence  to  the  evolutionary  ef- 
fort of  the  whole.  A  huge  effort  is  now  be- 
coming discernible,  an  attempt  to  achieve  more 
consciousness,  and  the  war  and  the  class-war, 
considered  in  this  relation,  take  shape  as  per- 
verse endeavours  to  resist  that  effort.  Men 
are  reluctant  to  change  their  minds,  and  when, 
their  ideas  falling  behind  the  necessity  of  the 
time,  they  suffer  they  are  apt  to  attribute  their 
suffering  to  those  whom  they  have  learned  to 


44  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

regard  as  their  enemies.  When  a  man  stum- 
bles over  a  brick  and  hurts  his  toe  he  will  often 
seek  relief  in  kicking  the  brick.  Men  have  no 
enemies  other  than  themselves:  they  are  as- 
sured in  their  mastery  of  Nature.  It  is  only 
in  self-mastery  that  they  are  uneasy  and  un- 
comfortably aware  of  futility.  Self-mastery 
is  only  to  be  won  through  work:  drudgery  de- 
stroys it,  and  drudgery  can  only  be  destroyed 
by  the  removal  of  poverty,  dread  of  which  is 
the  prime  motive  force  in  the  present  organ- 
isation of  society. 

Can  it  be  done?  It  can  and  it  must  be 
done  if,  as  I  maintain,  humanity  is  engaged 
in  a  tremendous  evolutionary  effort.  This 
new  consciousness,  eager  to  explore  the  world 
revealed  by  mechanical  power,  most  eager  to 
discover  the  buried  treasure  of  the  human 
heart,  will  not  tolerate  the  drag  upon  its  ac- 
tivity of  a  dread  akin  to  that  which  has  been 
so  patiently  conquered,  namely,  the  fear  of 
Nature.  The  only  remaining  question  is  as 
to  whether  this  conquest  shall  be  achieved 
through  disaster  or  through  triumph,  through 
a  collapse  upon  force  or  through  the  assertion 
of  mind  and  will.  It  is  a  lamentable  fact  that 
hitherto  great  social  changes  have  only  been 


HUMANITY  m 

brought  about  through  hunger,  but  now  it 
seems  to  be  within  the  bounds  of  possibihty 
that  the  hunger  of  the  spirit  may  prove  to  be 
a  swifter  and  more  effective  explosive  force 
than  the  hunger  of  the  belly.  Certainly  the 
hunger  of  the  spirit  is  the  force  with  which 
we  have  to  reckon — old  illusions,  old  fables 
have  lost  their  efficacy  to  satisfy  men  and  wom- 
en gathered  in  such  huge  masses  as  they  are 
to-day.  Even  the  lies  with  which  their  minds 
are  fed  are  but  perversions  of  the  truth:  they 
have  not  the  charm  and  the  potency  of  relig- 
ious and  poetical  inventions.  Gods  and  kings 
are  in  exile:  men  and  women  know  that  their 
rulers  are  men  and  women  like  themselves, 
and  they  are  in  a  mood  to  force  them  to  ack- 
nowledge their  responsibility,  not  to  any  im- 
agined power  or  majesty,  but  to  the  immediate 
and  real  authority  of  humanity.  That  is  the 
issue,  and  nothing  can  confuse  it.  Through 
history  it  has  become  more  and  more  urgent, 
but  until  the  earth  was  explored  and  con- 
quered it  could  be  obscured  by  a  thousand  and 
one  minor  quarrels.  Now  issue  is  joined,  and 
there  can  be  no  rest  until  the  principle  is  es- 
tablished that  the  doles  taken  from  the  daily 
toil  of  humanity  shall  be  used  for  humanity 


46  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

to  lighten  its  physical  toil  that  it  may  be  free 
for  spiritual  effort.  That  is  the  aim  of  all  hu- 
man endeavour.  It  can  now  be  clearly  seen, 
and  there  should  be  an  end  of  all  attempts  to 
disguise  it  with  smaller  aims  or  to  perpetuate 
the  diversion  to  material  ends  of  forces  whose 
purposes  are  spiritual.  The  desire  of  every 
living  thing  is  to  discover  the  Newfoundland 
of  its  own  soul.  In  human  beings  that  desire 
is  conscious,  and  in  them  their  natural  func- 
tions are  but  the  means  to  that  end.  They 
have  agreed  to  society  in  order  as  little  as  pos- 
sible to  be  impeded  by  those  functions,  and 
perpetually  they  urge  onwards  to  enrich  so- 
ciety with  their  discovery.  Exploration  of  the 
earth  is  but  the  symbol  of  that  other  voyage 
which  is  life,  and  the  mystics  sunk  in  contem- 
plation enrich  humanity  no  less  than  those  who 
reveal  far  countries  and  bring  back  charted 
the  imagined  oceans.  Humanity,  urged  on  by 
this  quest  of  the  soul,  has  incidentally  discov- 
ered the  boundless  wealth  of  this  planet,  but 
only  incidentally.  The  powers  revealed  have 
been  so  immense  as  to  dazzle  and  overwhelm 
the  mind  so  that  the  art  to  use  those  powers 
has  been  neglected.  ]Men  are,  for  the  lack  of 
such  art,  simply  rich  or  poor:  living  one  kind 


HUMANITY  47 

of  life  or  another,  and  in  both  character  is  of 
less  immediate  value  than  cunning,  because 
in  the  fever  engendered  by  lack  of  organisa- 
tion material  values  obscure  spiritual,  and 
property  dominates  life.  The  suffering  so 
created  is  barren,  and  prevents  the  operation 
of  the  fruitful  suffering  which  is  the  creative 
element  in  human  life  without  which  joy  can- 
not be  released.  The  joy  of  humanity  is  cap- 
tive, for  a  space,  but  joy  is  indestructible  and 
will  be  free.  Those  who  would  confine  it  do 
but  postpone  the  destruction  which  must  come 
upon  them  and  upon  human  society.  Joy  in 
its  freedom  destroys  that  it  may  create,  de- 
stroys the  old  and  the  outworn,  cleanses  and 
purges  and  gives  in  abundance:  while  greed 
destroys  only  that  it  may  take,  and  heaps  up 
dead  things  that  make  life  take  on  the  sem- 
blance of  a  tomb,  the  nature  of  which  no  mag- 
nificence can  disguise. 

Before  humanity  lies  the  most  momentous 
choice  of  its  destiny.  It  is  a  choice  that  has 
to  be  made  in  millions  of  instances  every  day, 
and  the  inadequate  structure  of  society  forces 
upon  the  vast  majority  the  wrong  choice.  With 
almost  every  breath  v/e  draw  we  have  to  choose 
between  life  and  death,  and  almost  always,  so 


48  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

constrained  are  we  by  false  appearances  and 
promises  of  ease  for  the  moment,  we  choose 
death.  Failure  to  seize  and  to  employ  one  op- 
portunity means  a  proportionate  weakness  in 
facing  the  next.  As  with  the  individual,  so 
with  the  mass.  The  grand  opportunity  will 
be  upon  us  in  the  next  generation.  Europe 
has  to  accept  or  to  deny  its  responsibility  to 
humanity,  to  choose  between  life  and  death. 
It  is  to  help,  in  however  small  a  degree,  in 
seeing  that  the  choice  is  truly  made,  and  that 
the  human  mind  shall  seek  out  the  human  will, 
its  only  trustworthy  power,  that  these  words 
are  written. 


Ill 

THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT 


Ill 

THE   SOCIAL   CONTRACT 

Rousseau  believed  that  there  was  a  Golden 
Age  and  that  Man  was  as  beneficent  as  Na- 
ture. We  know  that  Nature  is  not  altogether 
beneficent:  she  is  equally  maleficrnt.  And  so 
is  Man:  both  creative  and  destructive,  both 
good  and  evil,  and  as  dependent  upon  the  dual 
principle  as  he  is  upon  light  and  darkness.  An 
excess  of  goodness  is  as  enervating  to  human 
life  as  a  monotony  of  sunlight.  Humanity  is 
as  varied  as  the  sea,  and  its  desire  is  pitched 
beyond  good  and  evil,  between  which  there  is 
an  ever-widening  swing  of  the  pendulum,  ne- 
cessitating a  continual  emendation  of  the  social 
conceptions  of  good  and  evil.  As  this  change 
is  continuous  the  stability  of  society  depends 
ultimately  upon  man's  loyalty  to  humanity, 
which  must  operate  through  a  number  of  in- 
termediate loyalties,  and  it  is  precisely  here 
that  conflict  is  continually  arising.  A  man's 
loyalty  to  his  fellow-men,  his  contemporaries, 

51 


52  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

is  not  the  same  as  his  loyalty  to  humanity. 
When  conflict  arises  the  less  should  be  sacri- 
ficed to  the  greater,  whereas  most  commonly 
in  practice  it  is  demanded  that  the  greater 
should  be  sacrificed  to  the  less,  because  a  man's 
life  is  too  easily  bounded  by  what  appear  to  be 
his  immediate  interests,  or,  if  he  can  see  be- 
yond them,  he  is  too  often  forced  by  pressure 
into  limiting  his  vision  to  the  apparent  advan- 
tages of  his  social  group,  his  family,  trade,  or 
nation,  especially  at  times  when  it  seems  that 
these  advantages  are  threatened  by  those  of 
another  group.  He  is  then  reminded  of  his 
obligations  and  is  expected  to  be  guided  by  the 
voice  of  the  majority,  who  in  their  passion 
would  usurp  his  loyalty,  relying  upon  some 
such  idea  as  the  social  contract  expounded  by 
Rousseau  at  a  time  when  society  was  emerging 
from  feudalism.  We  have  travelled  far  since 
then,  and  have  become  scientific  in  our  habit  of 
mind,  and  need  some  definition  of  our  various 
loyalties. 

Every  man  carries  beneath  his  hat  his  in- 
numerable ancestors,  and  is  their  representa- 
tive in  the  assembly  of  humanity.  His  imme- 
diate loyalty  is  to  them ;  that  is,  to  himself,  and 
by  observing  that  loyalty  he  best  observes  his 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  58 

loyalty  to  humanity,  and  if  the  intermediate 
loyalties  rouse  conflict,  he,  as  the  trustee  of 
his  ancestors  to  humanity,  must  abide  by  his 
trust  and  range  himself  against  the  loyalty 
which  by  raising  conflict  has  proved  itself  to 
be  superfluous  and  unnecessary.  A  loyalty 
which  demands  action  without  vision  is  con- 
trary to  humanity,  for  humanity  is  governed 
by  vision  and  by  nothing  else.  Without  it 
chaos  and  anarchy  prevail,  as  at  intervals  of 
two  or  three  generations  they  invariably  do. 
Human  beings  must  be  fed,  but  the  lesser  pur- 
poses of  humanity  are  best  served  by  devotion 
to  the  greater,  just  as  the  will  of  a  section  of 
humanity  is  most  easily  and  effectively 
achieved  when  it  is  consonant  with  the  will  of 
humanity,  which  rests  not,  but  drives  on  un- 
ceasingly towards  its  goal.  The  most  dis- 
cernible purpose  of  that  will  is  not  to  rest  con- 
tent with  the  apparent  limitations  of  existence, 
whereas  it  becomes  the  aim  of  certain  individ- 
uals and  sections  of  himianity  to  turn  institu- 
tions into  limitations  added  to  those  set  by 
natural  law.  To  the  free  spirit  of  man,  or  the 
spirit  that  desires  freedom,  that  is  intolerable, 
for,  to  that  spirit,  all  things  human,  both  good 
and  evil,  should  tend  to  increase  man's  Iqiowl- 


54  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

edge  of  and  love  for  humanity,  for  only 
through  these  can  the  unattainable  absolute  be 
approached.  Hence,  the  perpetual  revolt  of 
man  not  so  much  against  his  institutions  as 
against  the  uses  to  which  they  are  put.  Insti- 
tutions do  not  greatly  change:  the  organisa- 
tions of  pubUc  and  private  life  depend  upon  a 
few  devices  which  the  more  they  change  the 
more  they  are  the  same.  Every  man  is  both 
himself  and  a  social  being,  and  the  only  power 
that  can  reconcile  these  two  entities  is  his  own 
conscience.  The  social  contract  is  signed  in  a 
man's  own  soul  or  not  at  all,  and  if  it  be  not 
signed  he  remains  a  turbulent  and  anarchic 
creature  parasitic  upon  humanity,  and  conlfn- 
ually  sacrificing  life  to  the  satisfaction  of  his 
own  appetites.  He  remains  the  prey  of  every 
trick  and  fraud  designed  to  cheat  him  of  his 
birthright.  Kingcraft,  priestcraft,  mobcraft 
have  him  at  their  mercy,  and  can  force  him  at 
any  moment  to  sacrifice  the  loyalties  imposed 
upon  him  in  his  birth  to  the  advantages  of  his 
group.  This  has  been  the  order  of  society  for 
so  long  that  it  is  accepted  as  in  the  nature  of 
things,  though  with  the  slow  enlargement  of 
groups  perception  has  been  widened,  greater 
freedom  has  been  won;  and  though  the  pres- 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  55 

sure  from  the  majority  has  increased,  it  has 
served  to  heighten  the  courage  of  the  minor- 
ity, who  have  become  aware  of  the  true  nature 
of  the  social  contract,  and  who  know  that 
whenever  the  interest  of  a  section  of  humanity 
is  exalted  above  humanity's  laws  that  contract 
is  violated. 

As  every  individual  is,  by  that  contract,  a 
trustee,  so  every  institution  is  vested  with  its 
powers  in  trust  and  not  absolutely.  The  trend 
of  social  evolution  is  away  from  law  towards 
equity,  and  from  property  to  the  principle  of 
trust.  This  may  tend  to  limit  the  opportuni- 
ties for  material  adventure,  but  it  releases  en- 
ergy for  the  adventures  of  the  soul.  It  spreads 
responsibihty  and  liability  more  evenly,  and 
makes  it  more  possible  for  more  men  and  wom- 
en to  realise  the  social  contract  to  which  they 
owe  their  existence,  and  its  relief  from  drudg- 
ery, the  increasing  value  of  their  work  and 
their  growing  pride  in  it.  This  process  con- 
tinually breaks  down  barriers,  first  the  family, 
then  the  caste,  then  the  kingdom,  then  the  na- 
tion, as  more  and  more  co-operation  is  needed. 
Those  who  resist  this  process  for  the  sake  of 
a  long  row  of  ciphers  in  a  banker's  ledger  may 
get  the  ciphers,  but  they  obtain  nothing  else. 


56  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

For  them,  even  those  human  beings  through 
whom  they  should  live  become  ciphers,  and 
they  might  be  left  to  their  miserable  fate,  but 
that  they  are  in  a  position  to  force  their  cipher- 
vision  upon  the  multitudes  who  by  dread  of 
poverty  are  forced  to  work  for  them. 

Than  this  cipher-vision  no  more  powerful 
means  was  ever  invented  for  obscuring  the  so- 
cial contract.  The  devices  of  organised  relig- 
ion were  trivial  compared  with  it;  the  mirage 
of  military  glory  with  which  kings  maintained 
their  state  is  by  comparison  impotent.  It 
transfers  life  from  the  good  earth  to  paper, 
and  its  problems  are  worked  out  there.  Those 
problems  that  defy  such  solution  are  ignored, 
and  to  prevent  their  arising  economic  power  is 
ruthlessly  used  to  reduce  the  workers  of  the 
world  to  slavery. 

Never  was  humanity  in  a  more  tragic  plight 
than  now,  when  its  mar^'ellous  ingenuity  and 
heroic  power  are  employed  for  the  creation  of 
ciphers  and  nothing  else.  To  that  the  gran- 
deur that  was  Greece  and  the  glory  that  was 
Rome  have  been  reduced.  Such  thinking  as 
can  force  its  way  through  this  nullity  is  done 
in  a  vacuum,  and  can  achieve  nothing  to  dis- 
turb these  complacent    O's.     Except  by  the 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  67 

shifting  of  ciphers  from  one  ledger  to  another, 
or  from  page  to  page  of  the  same  ledger,  noth- 
ing can  be  done,  and  yet  the  control  of  the  ci- 
phers remains  in  the  hands  of  men  who  have 
sacrificed  all  knowledge  of  the  social  contract 
to  collect  them.  Power  remains  with  them 
in  every  section  of  society,  and  in  every  sec- 
tion when  alarm  at  the  approach  of  disaster 
becomes  articulate  the  inhabitants  of  it  are 
urged  to  defend  themselves  against  an  exter- 
nal enemy.  Men  are  badged  and  numbered 
and  given  allotted  tasks  in  that  defence  to 
which  their  normal  humane  occupations  are 
sacrificed,  and  public  powers  are  used  to  aug- 
ment private  profits. 

That  is  the  fatal  flaw  in  the  present  organ- 
isation of  society.  In  old  times,  kings  and 
priests  used  their  public  powers  in  their  phil- 
osophy, if  not  always  in  their  practice,  to  the 
public  advantage.  They,  like  the  humblest 
peasant,  commended  their  souls  to  God,  but 
the  modern  rulers  of  the  world  have  no  faith 
except  in  ciphers,  and  they  are,  in  such  philos- 
ophy as  they  possess,  divorced  from  the  life  of 
the  people.  A  great  merchant  can  pretend 
that  the  expansion  of  his  fortune  is  proof  of 
his  service  to  society,  but  there  is  no  check 


58  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

on  his  use  of  it,  and  nothing  to  show  that  the 
service  he  has  rendered  might  not  have  been 
better  done  by  other  methods  and  by  a  proper 
and  conscientious  use  of  public  powers.  Yet 
the  mischief  between  the  rich  and  the  poor  is 
that,  while  the  rich  are  dealing  in  ciphers  the 
poor  have  to  grapple  with  the  hard  actualities 
of  existence.  Thus  they  speak  difiFerent  lan- 
guages, use  the  same  words  often  in  contrary 
senses:  the  poor  attaching  a  concrete  meaning 
to  everything,  the  rich  thinking  in  the  abstrac- 
tions of  conimerciahsm.  Those  who  lend  their 
money  upon  interest  to  industrial  undertak- 
ings have  as  a  rule  not  the  slightest  knowledge 
of  their  working,  and  therefore  accept  the  ap- 
parent prosperity  shown  in  annual  reports 
with  entire  complacency,  and,  of  course,  with- 
out a  thought  of  its  bearing  upon  the  social 
contract.  As  this  poHte  usury  is  the  basis  of 
modern  civilisation  it  is  here  that  we  find  the 
source  of  its  inhumanity.  The  great  men  of 
finance  recognise  their  responsibility  to  their 
shareholders,  but  not  their  responsibihty  to 
their  managers  and  workpeople,  who,  in  the 
interest  of  the  shareholders,  are  paid  as  little 
as  they  can  be  got  to  accept.  Certainly  we 
have  advanced  very  far  from  the  hideous  abus- 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  69 

es  of  the  early  nineteenth  century,  but  we 
have  not  yet  succeeded  in  establishing  justice 
as  a  principle  in  commercial  organisations 
from  which  necessarily  has  grown  the  struc- 
ture of  society.  For  lack  of  justice  there  is 
no  liberty  in  that  structure,  and  for  lack  of 
liberty  there  is  no  health,  and  the  social  con- 
tract cannot  operate  because  it  is  thwarted  by 
the  lop-sided  contracts  which  it  is  the  aim  of 
every  business  man  to  secure. 

Authority  in  any  community  is  developed 
out'  of  the  contract  agreed  between  the  indi- 
vidual as  private  and  as  public  person,  which 
is  forced  upon  him  first  of  all  in  family  life, 
later  at  school,  and  finally  as  a  citizen.  Di- 
rectly a  man  admits,  as  he  must,  the  rights  of 
others  to  his  services  in  return  for  theirs,  he 
enters  upon  a  contract — immediately  with  the 
persons  surrounding  him,  but  ultimately  with 
humanity — and  authority,  liberty  and  justice 
depend  upon  the  due  observance  of  that  con- 
tract. In  Europe,  suffering  under  a  fever  of 
nationahsm,  it  has  been  assumed  that  the  con- 
tract is  between  the  individual  and  the  nation 
to  which  he  belongs.  There  is  such  a  contract, 
but  it  is  only  a  clause  in  the  greater,  and  should 
be  a  means  to  its  fulfilment.    That  it  has  not 


60  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

been  so  is  due  to  the  economic  injustice  of  the 
social  system,  by  which  men  have  been  forced 
to  sacrifice  the  greater  to  the  less,  and  in  fore- 
going their  own  egoism  to  contribute  to  that 
of  their  nation. 

There  is  no  need  here  to  labour  the  tragic 
consequences  which  have  brought  us  suddenly 
face  to  face  with  the  need  for  authority  and 
for  tracing  it  to  its  source.  It  lies  in  the  so- 
cial contract  by  which  the  individual  acknowl- 
edges his  social  relationship  in  return  for  the 
advantages  that  can  be  won  for  humanity.  To 
preserve  that  social  contract  amid  the  innu- 
merable other  contracts  that  have  to  be  entered 
into  Government  is  agreed  upon  and  appoint- 
ed as  trustee;  and  hitherto  the  trust  has  been 
betrayed  in  favour  of  the  rich  and  against  the 
poor,  because  there  has  been  no  visible  author- 
ity beyond  Government  in  the  various  com- 
munities, and  no  means  by  which  public  opin- 
ion all  the  world  over  can  make  itself  felt; 
and  yet  from  ever\^  breach  of  trust  on  the  part 
of  the  various  manipulated  Governments  hu- 
manity has  suffered  disastrously.  It  was  this 
long  tale  of  suffering  that  caused  Nietzsche  to 
cry  out  for  a  race  of  super  en,  and  Kropotkin 
and  Bakunin,  coming  with  freshness  of  energy 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  61 

to  a  worn  civilisation,  to  acclaim  Anarchy  as 
the  solution  of  its  problems.  Meanwhile,  be- 
fore these  prophets  could  be  understood,  there 
has  come  a  crisis  which  by  sheer  economic  ne- 
cessity enforces  simplification  and  an  attempt- 
ed understanding.  On  the  one  hand,  the  trusts 
and  cartels,  on  the  other,  the  Trades  Unions 
tighten  up  their  machinery  dreading  lest  the 
rest  of  the  world  should  sink  into  the  famine 
and  bloodshed  which,  for  lack  of  machinery, 
social  and  industrial,  has  been  the  fate  of  Rus- 
sia. However,  as  the  crisis  came  from  this 
tightening  of  machinery  by  both  capital  and 
labour,  it  seems  improbable  that  further  ef- 
forts in  that  direction  will  find  a  solution. 

Taking  Great  Britain  as  a  typical  indus- 
trial community  of  this  unfortunate  age,  we 
find  that  the  public  is  alternately  held  up  by 
the  operations  of  the  trusts  restricting  imports 
and  the  strikes  of  the  Trades  Unions  against 
those  operations.  The  accounts  of  this  con- 
tinual conflict  given  in  the  newspapers  are 
misleading  and  prejudiced,  and  it  is  nowhere 
suggested  that  these  two  vast  machines  should 
be  conscientiously  used  for  humanity  instead 
of  against  each  other.  Both  sides  cry  politi- 
cally "Great  Britain  for  the  British,"  oblivious 


6ft  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

of  the  fact  that  Great  Britain  is  only  impor- 
tant as  an  enlightened  member  of  humanity, 
and  as  trustee  of  a  great  part  of  the  earth's 
products.  The  contract  between  Great  Brit- 
ain and  the  individual  is  insisted  upon:  that 
between  Great  Britain  and  humanity  is  de- 
nied. The  trust  principle  is  ignored  and  the 
individual  British  make  their  social  contracts 
only  to  have  them  thwarted  by  the  action  of 
their  Government.  The  result  is  serious  not 
only  for  the  British  but  for  humanity,  for  it 
means  that  the  British  Empire  sprawls  be- 
tween the  mechanised  energy  of  America  and 
the  spiritual  energy  of  Russia,  and  prevents 
the  formation  of  the  society  which  both  those 
energies  desire.  Both  America  and  Russia 
look  to  Great  Britain  for  guidance  and  help, 
and  receive  nothing  but  the  cry  of  a  wounded 
egoism.  Great  Britain  to  the  rest  of  human- 
ity has  been  something  more  than  an  island: 
she  has  meant  certain  liberal  and  humane  prin- 
ciples by  which  the  idealism  of  more  fiery  races 
can  be  made  practicable.  But  now  it  seems 
that  with  that  practical  sense,  which  so  fre- 
quently tyrannises  over  her  nobility,  she  is 
bent  on  making  her  Victory  as  dreary  and  hor- 
rible as  her  Sunday,  so  that  her  citizens  will 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  6S 

be  only  too  glad  to  return  to  work  under  any 
conditions.  .  .  .  That  would  be  all  very  well 
if  a  new  world  were  not  in  the  making,  in 
which  the  new  consciousness  that  is  beginning 
to  dawn  in  the  east  must  play  its  part.  That 
consciousness  has  given  a  new  direction  to  the 
human  will:  a  direction  not  dreamed  of  by 
Adam  Smith  or  Cobden  or  even  John  Bright. 
It  is  profoundly  and  unalterably  aware  of  the 
social  contract  and  is  insisting  upon  it  as  the 
essential  element  in  government;  and  because 
the  social  contract  disturbs  the  contracts  to 
which  the  financiers  owe  their  power,  they  are 
resisting  them  with  every  available  means.  The 
admission  of  the  social  contract,  as  a  natural 
bargain  between  the  individual  and  humanity, 
implies  the  revision  of  those  contracts.  It  leads 
to  what  Nietzsche  attempted,  the  transvalua- 
tion  of  all  values,  and  to  a  drastic  alteration 
not  only  of  the  structure  but  of  the  basis  of  so- 
ciety. It  means  that  society  also,  as  well  as 
individual  men,  approaches  God  through  hu- 
manity, and  that  men  will  no  longer  look  for 
authority  from  on  high,  but  within  themselves 
and  their  personal  relationships.  Once  admit- 
ted, it  can  be  recognised  and  acknowledged 
wherever  it  shows  itself,  but  authority  and  the 


64»  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

social  contract  upon  which  it  depends  can  only 
be  seen  through  love,  the  active  and  passionate 
love  preached  by  Jesus  Christ,  but,  alas!  per- 
verted into  a  milky  resignation,  which  per- 
haps has  more  than  anything  else  contributed 
to  the  triumph  of  injustice,  now  at  last  so  in- 
tolerable that  men  must  admit  the  spiritual 
means  by  which  they  live  and  rediscover  love. 
Without  that  the  tyranny  of  machinery  must 
continue,  and  human  traffic  will  be  impeded  to 
the  lasting  hurt  of  civilisation.  In  the  chaos 
of  the  last  century  we  invented  policemen  to 
regulate  the  traffic;  now  we  have  to  invent 
some  means  of  regulating  the  policemen.  In 
other  words,  we  have  to  insist  that  the  social 
contract  which  binds  individuals  shall  also  bind 
the  governments  elected  by  them,  and  that 
just  as  individuals  have  abandoned  dueUing  in 
favour  of  Law,  so  Governments  shall  abandon 
war.  Just  as  the  wearing  of  swords  was  found 
to  impede  the  operation  of  the  social  contract, 
so  it  has  been  with  national  armaments.  The 
social  contract  is  there,  just  as  the  principle 
of  marriage  is  there,  as  an  inherent  condition 
in  the  existence  of  humanity.  We  have  noth- 
ing else.     If  it  is  denied  we  are  driven  back 


THE  SOCIAL  CONTRACT  65 

upon  force  which  settles  nothing  except  that 
the  innocent  suffer  for  the  guilty,  and,  what 
we  already  know  too  well,  that  the  fathers 
have  eaten  sour  grapes  and  the  children's  teeth 
are  set  on  edge. 


IV 
PATRIARCHALISM 


IV 


PATHIARCHALISM 


The  most  vigorous  and  persistent  race  in 
Europe  is  the  Jewish,  which  has  forced  its 
God  and  its  domestic  institutions  upon  the 
subtler  and  more  distracted  peoples.  There 
is  no  Jewish  Empire — unless  the  world, 
through  the  Rothschilds,  the  Sassoons,  the 
Cassels,  the  Speyers,  be  regarded  as  such — 
and  no  Jewish  hegemony.  Rather  do  the  Jews 
desire  that  which  they  cannot  achieve,  absorp- 
tion into  the  other  races  and  a  share  in  that 
beauty  which  those  races  pursue.  The  Jews 
are  weary,  it  seems,  of  the  curse  upon  Ahas- 
uerus.  They  buy  the  treasures  of  Greece  and 
Rome,  but  they  cannot  buy  the  civiHsing  prin- 
ciple. Nowhere  can  they  take  root,  nowhere 
can  they  draw  sustenance  from  humanity  as 
other  races  do  who  build  and  destroy  and  build 
again.  The  Jew  clings  to  his  God  and  his 
family,  and  dares  not  look  beyond  them.  He 
amasses  riches  to  the  glory  of  his  God  and 


70  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

the  splendour  of  his  family,  but  remains  a  cap- 
tive in  Babylon.  He  cannot  desert  the  patri- 
archal principle.  His  world  is  a  pyramid  built 
up  to  Jehovah,  and  the  father  or  patriarch,  as 
the  nearest  to  Jehovah,  is  invested  with  au- 
thority. It  may  be  that  the  Jews,  having  a 
strong  social  sense,  cling  to  this  arrangement, 
none  other  being  yet  forthcoming,  and  it  may 
be  that  to  it  they  owe  the  advantages  they  en- 
joy in  the  greedy  scramble  which  is  accepted 
as  life  in  Europe;  but  it  is  certain  that  they 
also  owe  to  it  their  unalterable  squalor  and 
their  hunger  for  beauty.  With  a  mournful 
envy  they  regard  the  adventurousness  of  other 
races,  but  their  traditions  are  too  strong  for 
them,  and  they  remain — Jews,  when  their  de- 
sire is  to  be  Europeans.  A  pathetic  desire  this, 
for  there  are  as  yet  no  Europeans,  no  Euro- 
pean tradition,  only  a  turbulent  and  rather 
hectic  attempt  to  assert  that  there  is  one.  The 
Jew  in  his  financial  outlook  is  European,  but 
in  other  matters  he  accepts  outwardly  the  tra- 
dition of  the  community  to  which  he  is  at- 
tached, while  inwardly  he  remains  solemnly 
faithful  to  Jehovah — ^truly  religious,  because 
religion  is  his  life,  justifying  even  such  plun- 


PATRIARCHALISM  71 

der  as  he  indulges  in  as  being  done  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  irreligious. 

Religion  consists  in  a  man's  belief,  not  in 
what  he  believes.  The  Jew  beheves  in  his  fam- 
ily and  his  God,  and  therefore  has  a  direct  aim 
set  for  his  activities.  In  what  does  the  modem 
European  believe?  Goethe,  Wagner,  Beetho- 
ven have  urged  him  to  believe  in  Europe,  but 
their  insistence  has  been  in  vain.  The  Jews 
have  given  Europe  a  certain  financial  struc- 
ture, but  there  their  contribution  ends,  because 
the  Europeans  cannot  yet  be  European.  Un- 
like the  Jews,  they  are  in  the  mass  unaware 
of  and  insensible  to  the  beauty  that  Europe 
has  created.  Wars  of  religion,  giving  place 
to  wars  of  patriotism,  have  robbed  them  of 
their  capacity  for  brotherhood,  so  that  even 
socialism  is  in  the  different  countries  tainted 
with  nationalism.  The  wars  of  Europe  have 
given  the  Jews  the  opportunity,  which  they 
have  not  been  slow  to  use,  of  building  up  the 
financial  structure  which  has  enabled  the  Eu- 
ropeans, in  spite  of  their  distractions,  to  dom- 
inate the  earth;  but  that  domination  stops 
short  at  finance,  because  the  Jews  have  noth- 
ing else  to  contribute,  their  God  and  their  con- 
ception of  the  family  being  rejected  in  favour 


72  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

of  a  wider  individualism,  and  the  principle  of 
spiritual  equality  growing  in  acceptance  with 
the  gradual  emancipation  of  women.  The  re- 
sult is,  that  while  the  Jews  are  in  a  position  to 
dominate  Europe,  they  have  not  the  mentality 
necessary,  and  can  only  manipulate  Europe's 
and  the  world's  finances.  That  is  an  essential, 
but  at  the  same  time  a  subordinate,  element  in 
government,  and  it  is  forced  into  undue  pre- 
doniinance  by  this  unfortunate  impasse.  Jew- 
ish finance — and  in  all  its  operations  it  reveals 
its  origin — pulls  in  one  direction,  the  evolution 
of  Europe  in  another.  The  Jews  perhaps 
more  than  any  other  people  know  the  meaning 
of  the  social  contract,  but  their  interpretation 
is  contrary  to  the  sense  in  which  it  is  desired 
by  other  men.  The  Jews  by  their  tradition  are 
driven  to  use  their  control  of  finance  to  estab- 
lish patriarchalism,  while  the  Europeans  de- 
sire their  society  to  promote  liberty;  and  the 
two  aims  are  incompatible.  As  Europe  must 
live,  the  inhabitants  of  the  unhappy  Continent 
are  constrained  to  accept  a  patriarchal  finan- 
cial system,  impressing  itself  on  all  their  ac- 
tivities, which  are  directed  to  the  abolition  of 
patriarchalism.  There  can  be  no  doubt  which 
of  these  two  forces  will  in  the  long  run  win. 


PATRIARCHALISM  73 

but  until  the  Europeans  become  European  it 
will  be  a  very  long  run. 

This  conflict  is  very  much  deeper  than  that 
between^  Capital  and  Labour,  which  indeed 
arises  out  of  it.  In  Great  Britain,  like  so  much 
else,  it  is,  or  has  been,  covered  up,  as  the  Brit- 
ish owe  a  great  deal  of  their  ascendancy  to 
their  skill  in  confusing  issues,  and  also  to  their 
having  assimilated  the  Jewish  financial  sys- 
tem as  a  powerful  aid  and  natural  ally  of  their 
own  patriarchal  system  of  land  tenure.  The 
result  has  been  that,  during  the  stress  of  the 
war,  the  slowly  built  up  attempts  at  democracy 
have  given  way  and  a  patriarchal  form  of  gov- 
ernment has  been  established,  although  the  en- 
thusiasm of  the  people  has  been  for  liberty  and 
democracy.  Now,  patriarchalism  can  only 
persist  by  the  imposition  of  discipline.  In  old 
days  that  was  obtained  through  a  religion 
promising  rewards  or  threatening  punishment 
hereafter;  but,  science  having  destroyed  the 
efficacy  of  religion,  discipline  can  now  only  be 
imposed  by  conscription  or  enforced  obedience 
to  a  power  that  has  no  authority.  The  exist- 
ing form  of  government  depends  upon  con- 
scription, which  will  therefore  remain  until  the 
existing  form  of  government  is  altered,  and 


74  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

that  cannot  be  until  the  financial  system  is 
changed. 

Masses  of  men  in  revolt  rarely  know  pre- 
cisely against  what  they  are  in  rebellion.  They 
are  roused  partly  by  their  physical  discomfort, 
but  more  by  the  gnawing  discontent  of  their 
o^vn  helplessness.  The  pugnacity  of  man  is  in 
the  long  run  directed  against  his  own  shadow. 

In  the  European  countries  the  prevalent 
anti-Semitism  is  not  altogether  directed  by 
Catholic  prejudice.  It  is  to  a  great  extent 
an  instinctive  revolt  against  the  Jewish  finan- 
cial system,  and  as  that  has  its  centre  in  Lon- 
don they  cannot  attain  it  and  are  exasperated 
by  their  own  futility;  and  the  more  easily, 
therefore,  is  their  animosity  diverted  into  the 
service  of  nationalism,  by  which  since  the 
French  Revolution  patriarchal  institutions 
have  been  able  to  preserve  themselves  until, 
through  all  the  shocks  and  alarms  of  war,  they 
have  crystallised  out  into  High  Finance,  whose 
operations  are  verily  those  of  a  God  of  Bat- 
tles, and  bear  a  terrible  resemblance  to  the 
actions  of  Jehovah  as  recorded  in  the  Old  Tes- 
tament. But  the  funds  manipulated  by  High 
Finance  are  composed  of  the  doles  extracted 
from  the  labours  of  the  workers  of  the  world. 


PATRIARCHALISM  76 

who,  as  education  spreads  among  them,  want 
to  know  why  they  should  be  enslaved  by  their 
work.  They  are  enslaved  because  the  power 
they  create  is  in  accordance  with  ideas  which 
that  power  has  rendered  inadequate,  ideas 
which,  moreover,  have  been  proved  to  be  false 
by  the  world's  brain  workers.  However,  as 
the  machinery  of  government  was  evolved 
from  those  ideas  and  the  machinery  remains 
unaltered,  the  ideas  remain  unchanged.  No 
reform  is  ever  effected  until  the  machinery  by 
which  an  abuse  or  an  anachronism  is  main- 
tained breaks  down,  and  those  reformers  who 
look  for  a  sudden  enlightened  upheaval  as  the 
result  of  their  eloquence  are  doomed  to  disap- 
pointment. Society  is  a  matter  of  machinery, 
and  is  beneficial  or  injurious  to  humanity  in 
accordance  with  the  ideas  by  which  that  ma- 
chinery is  controlled.  Patriarchal  ideas  were 
all  very  well  when  they  were  in  accordance 
with  humanity's  aspiration  for  a  Heaven  be- 
yond the  grave,  but  since  humanity's  aspira- 
tion is  for  liberty  this  side  death,  the  ideas  gov- 
erning the  machinery  of  society  must  be 
brought  into  harmony  with  it.  The  idea  in  an 
old  man's  head  cannot  be  altered,  and  this  is  a 
matter  for  youth  alive  to,  and  thrilling  with, 


Sre  TSTE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

the  new  consciousness  that  has  come  into  hu- 
manity. The  old  men  cHng  to  High  Finance 
and  its  patriarchalism,  and  cannot  understand 
the  meaning  of  the  young  men  and  their  de- 
mand for  change.  To  the  old  men  High  Fi- 
nance has  been  an  end  in  itself,  like  all  things 
patriarchal,  while  the  young  men  demand 
that  it  shall  be  a  means  to  the  gradual  fulfil- 
ment of  their  aspiration.  The  old  men  are 
astonished:  they  have  toiled  and  schemed  and 
planned  and  plotted,  and  have  woven  a  web 
from  whose  embrace  the  young  men  are  intent 
upon  escaping.  The  old  men  say:  "You  must 
produce  more";  the  young  men  say:  "It  is 
useless  to  produce  anything  until  the  tyranny 
of  High  Finance  is  broken."  At  this  point  in 
the  argument  the  old  men  lose  their  tempers, 
because  they  have  been  unaware  of  any  tyr- 
anny, and  they  cannot  realise  that  the  young 
men  are  speaking  not  only  for  their  generation 
but  also  for  the  soul  of  humanity.  The  trag- 
edy through  which  they  have  passed  has  made 
them  prophetic.  In  them  sounds  again  the 
prophecy  voiced  by  Walt  Whitman  after  the 
American  tragedy  of  the  last  century.  They 
demand  that  human  society  shall  be  based  sol- 
idly upon  the  earth,  and  the  right  of  all  men 


PATRIARCHALISM  77! 

to  extract  sufficient  food  from  it,  and  no  long- 
er be  kept  perilously  dependent  upon  a  hy- 
pothesis, for  patriarchalism  is  no  more.  It 
rests  entirely  upon  the  ill-founded  assumption 
that  a  man  in  power  is  ex  officio  hallowed  with 
authority  from  above.  If  we  have  learned 
anything  from  science,  it  is  that  natural  forces 
are  more  subtle  than  the  human  mind  can  pos- 
sibly conceive,  and  that  if  there  be  a  divine 
will  it  operates  through  the  will  of  all  species 
and  all  living  things.  Before  this  was  or  could 
be  realised,  the  human  capacity  for  illusion 
being  what  it  is,  patriarchalism  was  a  suffi- 
ciently rough-and-ready  means  of  introducing 
order  into  the  affairs  of  communities;  but  as 
these  grew  from  hundreds  into  thousands,  and 
from  thousands  into  millions,  the  means  have 
lost  their  efficacy.  The  power  created  by  enor- 
mous populations  could  no  longer  be  left  un- 
checked in  the  hands  of  the  obvious  persons, 
and  accordingly  committees  were  appointed  to 
control  them,  though  still  no  means  was  found 
to  restrain  the  centralisation  of  power.  Vast 
empires  grew,  and  with  them  the  control  of 
millions  of  lives  passed  into  the  hands  of  a 
few  men;  but  as  power  increased  authority 
waned,  and  for  the  lack  of  it  power  passed 


78  THE  ANAT0^^5f  OF  SOCIETY 

from  the  ruling  castes  to  the  classes  who  lent 
them  the  money  with  which  to  rule,  so  that 
government  in  the  modem  world  has  become 
a  matter  of  usury.  There  is  a  class  which 
lends,  and  a  class  which  works  to  pay  the  in- 
terest on  money  lent,  and  there  is  a  small  class 
of  professional  money-lenders  who  take  a  large 
commission  on  all  loans,  and  it  is  with  these 
that  power  rests.  Now,  while  the  working 
class  deals  for  the  most  part  in  cash  transac- 
tions, the  others  live  by  credit,  and,  as  every 
one  knows  from  his  own  experience,  credit  is 
a  far  more  supple  instrument  of  currency  than 
cash.  The  working  classes  of  the  world  have 
no  credit,  and  are  therefore  at  the  mercy  of 
those  classes  who  have  it ;  and  these  classes  use 
it  patriarchally — that  is  to  say,  tyrannically 
— for  the  aggrandisement  which  is  a  legacy 
from  Jehovah,  whose  instructions  to  Abraham 
have  remained  the  guiding  principle  in  human 
aflPairs  in  spite  of  all  protest  from  reformers 
and  religious  teachers  and  non-conformist 
sects.  The  aggrandisement  which  the  poor 
have  been  denied  in  their  own  lives  they  have 
been  suffered  to  enjoy  as  members  now  of  a 
Church,  now  of  a  nation,  but  always  they  have 


PATRIARCHALISM  79 

had  to  pay  very  dearly  for  it,  until  at  last  they 
are  in  the  mood  to  pay  no  more. 

With  this  mood  the  young  men  of  to-day 
are  in  entire  sympathy,  while  the  old  imen 
cannot  understand  it,  throw  up  their  hands, 
and  imagine  that  the  universe  is  crashing 
about  their  ears.  What  is  crashing  is  the  sys- 
tem of  usury  upon  which  society  has  too  long 
depended,  and  with  it  go  the  usurers,  whose 
power  of  granting  or  withholding  credit  must 
in  the  future  be  administered  with  authority, 
if  only — to  put  it  at  its  lowest — to  check  the 
waste,  peculation  and  corruption  without 
which  those  who  cherish  patriarchal  power 
cannot  maintain  it.  Even  more  than  upon 
the  waste  incurred  in  armaments  does  such 
power  depend  upon  waste  in  bribery,  multi- 
plication of  offices,  contracting  and  sub-con- 
tracting, political  manipulation,  and  adminis- 
trative duplication,  by  which  a  ruling  caste  can 
maintain  its  inaccessibility  to  criticism  and 
democratic  pressure.  As  the  basis  of  the  rul- 
ing caste  in  modern  communities  has  changed 
from  a  birth  to  a  money  qualification,  and  as 
with  that  change  the  old  patriarchal  sanction 
has  disappeared,  parliamentary  institutions 
have  become  a  bulwark  between  the  ruling 


80  THE  ANATO^iY  OF  SOCIETY 

caste  and  the  proletariat,  and,  so  easy  has  it 
become,  in  the  absence  of  any  sanction,  to 
manipulate  those  institutions,  that  the  exten- 
sion of  the  franchise  serves  but  to  strengthen 
the  bulwark. 

Suppose,  for  a  moment,  that,  as  seems  prob- 
able, a  revolution  takes  place  in  Great  Britain, 
as  the  result  of  which  the  joint-stock  company 
system  becomes  obsolete  and  industries  are  na- 
tionalised. The  ruling  caste  of  shareholders 
will  be  replaced  by  a  ruling  caste  of  officials, 
who  will  not  be  easily  distinguishable  from  the 
persons  they  have  supplanted.  A  government 
dominated  by  Trade  Union  machinery  would 
not  be  very  different  from  a  government  dom- 
inated by  capitaUstic  machinery,  except  in  so 
far  as  the  system  of  delegation  is  an  advance 
on  representation.  There  would  still  remain 
the  patriarchal  idea  that  people  must  do  as 
they  are  told  to  do,  and  that  governments  exist 
for  the  purpose  of  giving  orders  and  are  in- 
herently disciplinary.  Hence  the  curious 
theory  which  prevails  in  Great  Britain  that  a 
government  cannot  say  "Yes"  or  "No"  with- 
out reference  to  a  commission,  which  shall, 
after  due  deliberation,  report;  and  hence,  too, 
the  equally  curious  necessity  for  talking  one 


PATRIARCHALISM  81 

language  in  the  constituencies,  another  in  the 
House  of  Commons.  The  notion  is  that  a 
government  being  given  power  must  use  it, 
wisely  or  unwisely,  or  appear  weak;  whereas, 
in  truth,  the  desire  of  plain  men  is  that  govern- 
ments shall  govern  as  little  as  possible.  The 
nationalisation  of  industries  does  not  mean 
that  they  shall  be  conducted  by  government 
departments,  but  that  government  depart- 
ments shall  be  trustees  to  see  that  they  are 
economically  administered,  with  a  due  regard 
for  what  is  financially  possible  and  for  the  best 
interests  of  all  concerned.  The  humble  work- 
ers in  industries  like  mining,  the  railways,  and 
the  docks  appeal  to  government  for  national- 
isation because  without  a  trustee  they  have 
found  themselves  in  a  hopeless  position.  The 
patriarchalism  of  Private  Enterprise  could  not 
give  them  the  wealth  it  promised,  and  they  ask 
that  the  system  shall  be  amended. 

If  a  man  works  hard  as  a  producer  and  at 
the  end  of  a  week  finds  that  he  has  not  been 
able  to  supply  his  needs  as  a  consumer,  he 
knows  perfectly  well,  without  any  theory  of 
economics,  that  there  is  waste  somewhere,  and 
he  wants  it  corrected.  As  an  individual  he  can 
do  nothing,  but  in  combination  with  the  other 


8S  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

workers  in  his  trade,  all  in  the  same  plight,  he 
can  become  articulate;  and  if  his  grievance  re- 
mains unheard,  he  can  withhold  his  labour  un- 
til it  is  considered  and  if  possible  redressed. 
At  the  other  end  of  the  scale,  if  a  man  did 
precious  little  for  a  year  and  at  the  end  of  that 
time  found  himself  richer  by  many  thousands 
of  pounds,  he  would,  if  he  had  a  living  con- 
science, recognise  that  he  was  profiting  by  eco- 
nomic injustice,  and  he  would  associate  his 
strange  case  with  the  complaints  reaching  him 
from  all  sides.  He  would  agree  that  here  was 
a  case  for  the  modification  of  law  by  equity. 
He  might  even,  if  his  conscience  was  very 
acute,  realise  that  he  was  living  under  a  system 
that  made  him  in  all  innocence  an  offender 
against  humanity.  On  the  other  hand,  if  he 
had  no  conscience,  he  would  tell  himself  that 
the  workers  depended  for  their  pittance  upon 
the  profitable  investment  of  his  thousands, 
write  to  his  stockbroker,  purchase  shares  in  an 
oil-field  or  a  palm-oil  region,  and  expect  the 
proletariat  to  be  enthusiastic  over,  even  to  lay 
down  their  lives  for,  the  extension  and  devel- 
opment of  the  Empire.  .  .  .  What  the  work- 
ers realise,  and  what  the  capitalist  does  not 
see,  is  that  the  last  of  the  patriarchs,  those  who 


PATRIARCHALISM  83 

dominated  the  nineteenth  century,  were  in  an 
unnecessary  hurry,  that  they  put  an  intoler- 
able strain  upon  their  machinery  and  the  men 
who  tended  it,  and  that,  at  last,  they  forced 
young  men  out  to  defend  a  system  that  had 
collapsed.  The  patriarchal  or  capitalistic  sys- 
tem has  not  been  broken  by  the  European 
War.  It  had  become  antiquated  a  decade  be- 
fore that.  Its  knell  was  written  by  George 
Gissing  in  the  'nineties.  The  great  Russians 
surveyed  European  civilisation  with  forebod- 
ing, knowing  full  well  that  their  own  people 
could  never  enter  it  until  it  had  shaken  off  its 
patriarchal  character.  The  Russians,  ready 
to  break  through  the  evils  of  feudalism  and 
serfdom,  could  not  accept  the  slavery  of  in- 
dustrialism with  its  triumph  of  mediocrity. 
The  moral  foundations  of  Europe  had  to  be 
broken  up  before  a  revolutionary  spirit  could 
stir  again  in  its  civilisation.  To  avert  the  com- 
ing of  the  new  age  the  patriarchs  made  war. 
They  have  brought  on  a  premature  birth,  and 
plunged  Europe  into  the  throes  of  revolution 
before  it  was  due,  in  the  hope  that  their  tra- 
ditions may  gain  a  new  lease  of  life  from  the 
resulting  confusion.  It  is  the  method  of  jeal- 
ousy, and  patriarchal  institutions  derive  their 


84  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

power,  and  also  their  stability,  from  the  smoul- 
dering passion  of  the  jealousy  with  which  the 
old  regard  the  young.  That  endures  from 
generation  to  generation,  and  ever  the  young 
of  heart  labour  to  overtake  it  and  stamp  it  out ; 
but  it  smoulders  on  beneath  the  surface,  flares 
up,  and  destroys  in  a  moment  what  years  have 
gone  to  make,  raises  impassable  barriers  of 
heat,  which  yet  are  passed,  though  too  much 
is  spent  in  the  effort;  so  that  what  is  done  falls 
far  short  of  the  dream.  Old  men  in  their  jeal- 
ousy contrive  that  the  ways  of  life  shall  be  so 
intricate  that  by  the  time  a  man  has  achieved 
the  position  and  the  experience  to  enable  him 
to  give  the  best  that  is  in  him,  he  too  shall  be 
w  orn  and  bitter  and  fearful  of  the  young  men 
coming  after  him.  That  is  the  beginning  of 
patriarchalism,  and  Jehovah  is  made  in  the 
likeness  of  an  old  man  whose  thoughts  and 
deeds  spring  from  jealousy. 

Two  thousand  years  ago  this  time-hallowed 
jealousy  was  corrected  by  the  saying,  "God 
is  love,"  and  those  two  thousand  years  have 
been  spent  in  a  bloody  anguish  in  the  attempt 
to  wrest  the  powers  of  the  earth  from  the  God 
of  Jealousy  for  the  God  of  Love.  Jealousy  in 
that  anguish  has  been  sweated  out  of  the  indi- 


PATRIARCHALISM  86 

vidual  into  the  family,  out  of  the  family  into 
the  nation,  and  out  of  the  nations  into — what? 
Into  rival  Leagues  of  Nations,  or  is  it  shaken 
off  for  ever?  .  .  .  Russia  has  repudiated  the 
patriarchs.  It  remains  to  be  seen  whether  La- 
bour in  industrial  civilisation  will  be  strong 
enough  to  follow  that  example.  Russia  has 
had  in  Tolstoi,  Dostoieffsky  and  Tschekov 
great  preachers  of  love.  The  Western  World 
has  had  Whitman,  Gissing,  Mark  Rutherford, 
Romain  RoUand,  and,  above  all,  Cesar 
Franck.  These,  surely,  are  enough  to  give  the 
inspiration  that  is  needed  in  the  crucial  trial 
between  jealousy  and  love,  between  evil  and 
good,  between  the  spirit  that  takes  and  gives 
nothing  and  the  spirit  that  takes  in  giving. 
The  last  stronghold  of  that  patriarchalism 
which  grows  out  of  jealousy  is,  by  the  irony 
which  makes  life  even  at  its  most  tragic  so 
charming,  Great  Britain,  the  "home  of  free- 
dom." It  is  in  Great  Britain,  the  only-beget- 
ter of  industrialism,  that  battle  is  joined,  and 
it  is  in  Great  Britain  that  the  battle  will  be 
won. 


V 
MARRIAGE 


MARRIAGE 

If  society  exists  to  protect  human  beings 
from  their  appetites,  nowhere  is  the  operation 
of  society  more  imperative  than  with  regard 
to  that  appetite  which  is  so  imperious  that  in- 
dividual passions  can  produce  general  trage- 
dies. If  Cleopatra's  nose  had  been  shorter  the 
face  of  the  whole  world  would  have  been  dif- 
ferent. Through  marriage  the  social  contract 
touches  the  living  core  of  humanity,  and  has 
its  most  direct  influence  upon  the  hfe  .of  the 
generations.  Unfortunately,  marriage  has 
been  of  all  contracts  the  most  lop-sided,  be- 
cause women  have  not  been  regarded  as  ca- 
pable of  entering  upon  the  social  contract. 
Woman  could  only  have  a  relationship  with 
the  community  through  a  patriarch,  her  father 
or  her  husband.  Other  communities,  other 
laws,  but  hitherto  all  communities  have  agreed 
to  keep  women  either  in  slavery  or  in  tutelage, 
so  that  the  contract  of  marriage  has  been 


90  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

everywhere  a  festering  source  of  injustice  and 
a  denial  of  the  spiritual  equality  frcMn  which 
the  health  of  humanity  springs,  and  until  that 
equality  is  established  here  it  is  not  likely  to 
prevail  anywhere  else:  for  however  well-mean- 
ing a  man  may  be  in  his  public  character,  he 
cannot  act  vigorously  and  freely  if  his  private 
life  is  based  upon  injustice.  Equality  must 
exist  in  the  home  before  it  can  appear  in  the 
life  of  the  commonwealth,  and  men  cry  in  vain 
for  freedom  so  long  as  women  are  trammelled. 

Marriage  is  a  natural  merger  of  two  lives 
to  create  a  holy  state  that  is  greater  than  either, 
and  this  state  is  fortified  by  daily  habits  and 
responsibilities.  With  the  best  will  in  the 
world  a  man  and  a  woman  in  their  relationship 
may  fail  to  bring  this  holy  state  into  being, 
and  therefore  no  marriage  has  taken  place. 
Churches  and  laws  have  evolved  a  system  by 
which  marriage  is  regarded  as  existing  through 
patriarchal  blessing,  and  they  make  no  provi- 
sion for  dissolution  in  the  event  of  failure, 
leaving  it  to  daily  habit  and  responsibihty  to 
preserve  the  tie.  But  when  there  is  no  spiritual 
bond  the  tie  of  habit  is  irksome  and  devastat- 
ing. 

Nature  in  her  desire  for  reproduction  cares 


MARRIAGE  91 

not  a  rap  whether  her  couples  are  married  or 
no,  and  of  course  society  cannot  emulate  the 
indifference  of  Nature.  But  to  society  the 
spiritual  creativeness  of  marriage  is  of  even 
more  importance  than  the  production  of  chil- 
dren, and  it  is  the  spiritual  principle  of  mar- 
riage that  needs  protection.  By  making  a  legal 
contract  indissoluble,  society  denies  that  prin- 
ciple and  conmiits  self-injury  through  confus- 
ing a  voracious  appetite  with  a  creative  force. 
A  mere  appetite  is  easily  sated,  but  a  creative 
force  will  not  desist  until  it  has  seen  the  farth- 
est consequence  of  its  actions.  The'  one  sep- 
arates ;  the  other  binds.  A  man  and  a  woman 
joined  in  a  brief  sensuality  soon  part  in  hatred, 
bitterness  or  contempt,  or,  worse  still,  in  an 
indifferent  nuUity.  If  they  happen  by  force 
of  circumstances,  or  under  a  heated  illusion — 
most  frequently  from  pity  on  one  side  or  the 
other — to  have  entered  upon  a  legal  contract, 
it  is  most  cruelly  anti-social  to  insist  that  they 
shall  remain  together  through  innumerable 
crises  of  nauseated  reaction.  It  is  worse  than 
that:  it  is  a  degrading  mockery  which  almost 
invariably  leads  to  seeking  relief  in  dissipation 
and  adultery,  to  suffering  for  many  innocent 


9«  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

parties,  and  to  the  waste  often  of  fine  energies 
and  qualities. 

Society,  while  not  emulating  the  indiflfer- 
ence,  should  learn  something  from  the  large- 
ness and  generosity  of  Nature.  Poor  human 
beings  struggling  with  their  most  overmaster- 
ing instinct  need  all  the  succour  they  can  gain 
from  each  other:  they  need  far  more  than  the 
patriarchal  Thou  Shalt  and  Thou  Shalt  Not. 
Very  few  are  the  men  and  women  who  are 
sunk  so  far  in  degradation  that  sexual  grati- 
fication is  become  a  light  thing  to  them.  Even 
the  most  idiotic  lovers  believe  on  the  first  im- 
pulse that  it  may  be  for  ever;  but  unless  love 
becomes  a  creative  force  with  them  it  cannot 
endure.  Men  desire  marriage  because  they  do 
not  wish  to  be  plagued  all  their  lives  with  dis- 
satisfaction;  but  that  dissatisfaction  is  only 
aggravated  by  a  marriage  that  has  failed,  and, 
now  that  science  has  shown  how  intimately 
linked  are  the  brain  and  the  sexual  apparatus 
in  men  and  women,  it  is  surely  time  that 
tyranny  was  removed  from  an  element  in  so- 
ciety so  vital  to  the  happiness  of  its  members. 

A  woman  can  no  longer  be  regarded  as  a 
man's  property.  With  that  conception  gone 
there  is  an  end  of  the  idea  of  marriage  as  a 


MARRIAGE  99 

contract  that  cannot  be  reconsidered,  and  the 
legal  and  religious  view  of  that  contract  has 
been  rendered  untenable  by  the  artificial  ster- 
ilisation of  conjugation.  A  man  and  a  woman 
married  can  no  longer  be  regarded  as  delivered 
up  to  the  mercies  of  their  own  fecundity.  This, 
more  than  anything  else,  has  contributed  to  the 
emancipation  of  women  who  now,  as  well  as 
men,  have  a  will  in  the  matter.  Until  she  had 
a  will  in  the  business  of  child-bearing  a  woman 
could  not  very  well  have  a  will  in  anything  else, 
and  to  this  has  been  due  her  subservience  to 
patriarchalism  and  to  laws  made  to  protect  her 
disabilities.  The  artificial  sanction  of  marriage 
being  removed,  the  natural  sanction  must  be 
sought,  and  that  sanction  can  only  be  found  in 
the  relationship  of  the  parties  themselves:  a 
pragmatic  sanction.  A  creative  marriage  will 
endure  of  its  own  deep  satisfaction:  a  sterile 
marriage  should  be  as  easily  dissoluble  as  any 
other  form  of  partnership. 

Ephemeral  relationships  between  men  and 
women,  adultery  and  concubinage,  exist  and 
will  exist  whatever  the  law.  It  is  right  that 
the  nobler  relationship  should  be  given  hon- 
ourable acknowledgment  and  treated,  as  in- 
deed it  is,  as  the  basis  of  society,  the  guarantee 


94  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

of  the  home  and  the  family;  but  relationships 
registered  in  mistake  or  under  illusion  should 
be  subject  to  revision  and  dissolution,  other- 
wise the  standard  of  morality  in  the  matter  is 
degraded  and  the  institution  of  marriage  is 
called  into  contempt,  and  can  be  used,  as  in- 
deed it  too  often  is,  for  nefarious  purposes,  to 
gain  money  or  influence,  or  to  consolidate  in- 
terests. 

The  institution  of  marriage,  like — ^indeed 
even  more  than — anything  else,  has  to  be 
called  in  question  now  when  we  have  to  rid 
ourselves  of  everything  that  cramps  our  ener- 
gies if  we  are  to  overtake  the  harm  done  by 
so  many  generations  of  moral  indolence,  which 
accepted  the  artificially  established  difference 
between  the  sexes,  a  tradition  so  ancient  as  to 
have  won  almost  the  sanction  of  a  natural  law. 
But  with  the  increased  division  of  labour  the 
disabilities  of  women  have  been  reduced  almost 
to  vanishing  point,  and  their  status  has  prac- 
tically reached  equality  with  men.  Yet  the 
laws  and  prejudices  which  govern  marriage 
remain  based  upon  the  old  inequality,  and 
about  no  subject  are  prejudices  so  rampant. 

This  is  because,  as  a  rule,  human  beings 
cannot  think  of  other  people's  love   affairs 


IVIARRIAGE  95 

without  jealousy  or  disgust,  and  a  scientific  at- 
titude towards  sex  is  repulsive  to  the  sentiment 
with  which  the  subject  is  coated.  Yet  people 
who  have  to  live  scientifically  in  all  other  mat- 
ters cannot  afford  to  remain  in  ignorance  or  a 
state  of  inflamed  distortion  about  the  central 
passion  of  their  lives.  Men  and  women  will  no 
doubt  lie  to  each  other  to  the  end  of  time,  but 
if  they  lie  with  knowledge  the  game  gains  in 
piquancy  and  charm :  and  here  hitherto  women 
have  had  the  advantage  over  men.  They  have 
of  necessity  been  liars  because  they  have  known 
the  truth,  while  men  have  been  confused  be- 
tween lies  and  truth,  and  for  this  reason,  as 
the  laws  relating  to  marriage  have  been  made 
by  men,  they  have  remained  muddled,  inef- 
fective, and  are  in  a  modern  community  a  per- 
petual nuisance. 

At  present  in  Great  Britain  two  people  who 
have  acknowledged  the  failure  of  their  mar- 
riage can  quite  easily  be  divorced;  but  at  the 
cost  of  degradation  and  unnecessary  scandal, 
and  the  risk  of  a  mess  being  made  of  their  af- 
fairs by  an  incompetent  or  unscrupulous  at- 
torney. The  one  fatal  bar  to  a  divorce  is  the 
desire  of  the  parties  for  it.  Therefore  the 
woman  must  perjure  herself  and  swear  that 


96  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

she  desires  the  return  of  her  husband,  while 
the  man  must  commit  an  open  act  of  adultery. 
This  method  is  pursued  every  day,  yet  a  de- 
mand for  the  introtiuction  of  plain,  simple 
honesty  is  met  with  cries  of  indignation,  la- 
ments for  the  destruction  and  corruption  of 
society,  and  denunciations  of  intelligent  re- 
formers as  professors  of  license  and  abettors 
of  libertinism :  whereas,  in  fact,  disgust  for  the 
operation  of  a  divorce,  drives  many  unhappy 
people  to  any  lengths  to  avoid  it,  and  they  pre- 
fer to  live  in  a  veiled  polygamy  and  polyandry 
with  all  the  corruption  of  looseness  added  to 
the  exasperation  of  secrecy.  A  society  parched 
for  honesty  cannot  afford  to  leave  so  rich  a 
source  of  hypocrisy  untouched.  The  trouble 
is  that  human  beings  are  hypocrites  and  enjoy 
hypocrisy  so  long  as  it  is  profitable  to  them, 
and  even  after  it  has  become  injurious  it  is 
difficult  to  persuade  them  of  the  fact.  Mar- 
riage being  the  profoundest  of  human  relation- 
ships gives  the  greatest  room  for  hypocrisy, 
and  the  more  degraded  it  is  the  more  room.  A 
hard-and-fast  law  degrades  marirage.  If  the 
parties  to  it  cannot  rescind  an  irksome  con- 
tract, they  have  somehow  to  make  it  tolerable, 
and  the  easiest  way  of  doing  that  is  by  lying  to 


MARRIAGE  OT 

each  other  and  resorting  to  the  game  of  bluff, 
by  which  human  affairs  are  for  the  most  part 
conducted.  But  marriage  is  a  more  delicate 
affair  than  most.  It  is  through  marriage  that 
men  and  women  are  in  most  immediate  contact 
with  humanity,  and  through  humanity  with  the 
creative  will,  and  as  Russell  Lowell  put  it — 

"You've  got  to  git  up  airly 
Ef  you're  goin'  to  take  in  God/* 

Here  most  often  the  game  of  bluff  breaks 
down  and  lives  are  wasted  in  years  of  barren 
suffering.  Time  may  bring  the  tolerance  of 
mute  despair,  but  than  this  nothing  could  be 
more  stultifying  and  sterihsing  to  the  human 
spirit  which  is  at  last  through  women  every- 
where in  organised  revolt.  Laws  made  to  pro- 
tect women  as  property  have  to  be  amended 
in  favour  of  laws  to  emancipate  women  as  hu- 
man beings,  and  with  this  change  comes  a 
fundamental  alteration  of  the  conception  of 
property,  the  long  overdue  shift  from  owner- 
ship to  trusteeship.  Marriage  also  is  a  trust. 
Men  and  women  are  trustees  for  each  other, 
and  above  all  for  the  most  sacred  emanation  of 
the  human  spirit,  true  wedded  love,  of  which  a 
child  is  the  glorious  symbol.    No  law  is  needed 


98  THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

to  protect  this  beauty,  but  only  to  protect  those 
unfortunates  who  fail  in  its  pursuit,  and  here 
again  the  difficulty  is  economic.  Who  is  to 
protect  the  child  that  is  only  a  child  and  not  a 
symbol,  and  to  see  that  the  failure  or  the  folly 
of  its  parents  does  not  weigh  too  heavily  upon 
it?  Out  of  love  a  home  will  grow  as  naturally 
as  a  nest  will  grow  out  of  the  mating  of  birds. 
To  clap  a  loveless  man  and  woman  into  a  joint 
existence  is  to  breed  disaster.  Society  is  re- 
sponisble  for  them  as  for  all  sufferers,  and  the 
immediate  concern  of  society,  which  exists  to 
abet  the  physical  well-being  of  its  members  so 
that  they  may  be  free  to  pursue  their  spiritual 
welfare,  is  with  the  mother  and  the  child,  who 
in  an  ordered  community  might  well  be  taken 
as  the  social  unit,  the  home  based  upon  true 
marriage  being  well  able  to  take  care  of  itself. 
By  protecting  the  mother  and  the  child  society 
would  be  going  far  to  save  for  marriage  many 
unhappy  people  who  are  at  present  thrust  out 
of  it,  and  are,  therefore,  unable  to  contribute 
their  keenest  forces  to  the  service  of  humanity. 
An  immense  amount  of  immorality  could  be 
saved  by  such  a  revaluation  of  moral  ideas ;  and 
the  division  of  women  into  two  classes,  those 
for  pleasure  and  those  for  child-bearing,  which 


MARRIAGE  99 

so  odiously  grew  up  under  the  conception  of 
women  as  property,  would  disappear,  with  the 
result  that  vast  numbers  of  women  would  be 
released  for  work  through  which  their  sexual 
needs  would  be  tamed.  They  would  no  longer 
be  dependent  for  their  career  and  their  pros- 
perity upon  their  sex.  True  marriage  would 
remain  untouched  because  it  is  unassailable. 
Those  who  defend  indissoluble  marriage  do  so 
out  of  their  concern  for  the  sanctity  of  prop- 
erty, and  from  their  point  of  view  they  are 
right,  for  once  the  conception  of  marriage  is 
elevated  the  conception  of  property  must  fol- 
low. If  the  moral  code  is  lowered  still  further 
by  an  increase  of  legal  tyranny  and  private 
license,  then  the  value  of  property  is  height- 
ened and  economic  tyranny  gains  in  force. 
Human  energy  that  is  diverted  from  liberty 
creates  tyranny.  Conception,  as  Hamlet  said, 
is  a  blessing,  and  there  is  no  liberty  without  it. 
In  true  marriage  each  of  the  lovers  is  con- 
ceived and  released  by  the  other.  So  it  is  in 
all  pure  relationships  into  which  love  enters. 
That  is  love's  activity,  to  conceive  and  bear 
liberty.  If  it  is  thwarted  there  is  either  bar- 
renness or  an  abortion.  Marriage  is  a  prin- 
ciple which  prevails  everywhere  and  not  only 


100         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

in  the  sexes.  It  prevails  in  the  region  of  ideas, 
in  art,  in  science,  in  politics,  even  in  commerce. 
A  bargain  is  a  kind  of  marriage:  fruitful  if  it 
be  just  and  equitable,  barren  or  abortive  if  it 
be  dishonest.  In  all  true  work  the  principle 
of  marriage  prevails :  the  labourer  is  wedded  to 
the  earth,  the  craftsman  to  his  materials,  and 
the  operation  of  this  principle  depends  vitally 
upon  its  free  working  in  the  relations  of  men 
and  women. 

Society  at  present  is  very  like  the  man  in 
Swift,  who  on  being  informed  that  there  was 
a  mistake  in  the  Bible,  cried,  "What!  A  mis- 
take in  the  Bible?  .  .  .  Then  I  can  go  on  with 
my  drinking  and  whoring." — "Whatl"  men 
seem  to  say,  "kings  and  priests  are  just  fools 
like  ourselves ;  Tsars  can  be  murdered  and  Em- 
perors exiled!  Then  we  can  do  what  we  damn 
please."  And  as  what  ignorant  men  please  is 
generally  to  their  hurt,  it  suits  those  who  find 
patriarchalisni  profitable  to  encourage  them  in 
their  doing,  with  the  result  that  wealth,  ma- 
terial and  spiritual,  is  consumed,  and  things 
that  were  holy  lose  their  sanction.  But  a 
greater  book  than  the  Bible  has  been  opened, 
the  Book  of  Nature,  and  a  greater  power  than 
the  wisdom  of  princes  has  been  discovered,  the 


marrlag:e  .' 


101 


heart  of  the  people.  Men  are  heginning  to 
read  the  one  and  to  honour  the  other,  finding 
at  last  that  the  one  true  marriage  is  that  be- 
tween man  and  humanity.  ...  It  is  for  this 
reason  that  the  words  of  governors  appointed 
by  years  of  intrigue  are  so  vain  and  empty. 
Reforms  can  no  longer  be  imposed  from  with- 
out in  favour  of  a  class  who  can  see  their  ad- 
vantage in  it.  Reform  grows  from  within. 
Three  generations  of  industrialism  have  cre- 
ated hideous  abuses,  but  they  have  liberated 
man  from  the  tyranny  of  the  earth.  In  the 
struggle  to  achieve  this  the  freedom  of  human- 
ity has  been  conceived,  and  men  will  no  longer 
submit  to  the  tyranny  of  men.  That  was  nec- 
essary until  the  tyranny  of  the  earth  was 
broken.  It  had  its  purpose  and  its  sanction, 
but  both  are  gone.  Humanity  aims  higher 
now — to  break  first  the  tyranny  of  men,  then 
the  tyranny  of  the  human  mind,  that  the  hu- 
man spirit  may  at  last  know  its  freedom  and 
live  in  unison  with  the  creative  spirit  by  whose 
will  all  that  lives  has  its  being. 

Marriage,  then,  is  symboHcal  of  the  greatest 
mystery.  It  is  the  fiery  principle  from  which 
all  other  social  principles  emanate.  It  is  the 
consummation  of  the  social  contract,  the  only 


102        .THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

begetter  of  liberty.  How  mistaken,  then,  is 
that  view  which  would  make  it  a  clog  upon  the 
passions  of  men  and  women  which  only  in  lib- 
erty can  find  the  coolness  to  reduce  them  to 
order  I  By  suppression  society  deprives  itself 
of  that  which  it  most  needs:  force  and  spon- 
taneity, and  defiles  the  social  spirit  at  its 
source.  By  making  the  contract  of  marriage 
indissoluble,  society  robs  men  and  women  of 
the  incentive  to  preserve  the  joy  without  which 
their  relationship  cannot  endure.  When  joy 
goes  nothing  but  the  tie  of  money  and  habit  is 
left.  That  may  bind  a  tolerant  affection,  but 
that  makes  for  stagnation,  which  is  of  all  states 
the  most  injurious  to  society  and  the  most 
blasphemous  upon  the  principle  of  marriage. 
Yet  it  is  the  state  most  suited  to  the  patriarchal 
system  which  brooks  no  questioning  of  author- 
ity, and  sees  it  only  in  power.  Most  admirable 
from  the  point  of  view  of  that  system  are  the 
innumerable  streets  in  the  innumerable  cities 
of  the  world  where  life  is  stagnant;  but  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  dwellers  in  those  streets 
and  those  towns  the  outlook  is  very  different. 
Their  work  is  given  back  to  them  in  a  lie  that 
every  day  grows  more  savourless :  the  pleasures 
they  are  allowed  are  thin  and  empty :  marriage 


MARRIAGE  lOa 

claps  them  into  a  little  prison  of  a  house  and 
opens  up  to  them  no  communal  life:  the  de- 
light they  should  expend  in  civic  works  and 
duties  is  diverted  to  vast  undertakings  di- 
rected by  remote  personages  for  which  they 
have  to  pay  in  unintelligibly  assessed  taxes. 
In  their  own  cramped  lives  they  have  to  seek 
that  which  the  ill-organisation  of  society  de- 
nies them,  and  so  perverse  has  that  organisa- 
tion become  that  it  has  arrived  at  a  flat  denial 
of  the  principle  of  marriage  and  aims  at  the 
use  of  the  males  for  the  purposes  of  war,  of 
the  females  for  breeding.  Their  mutual  joy 
counts  for  nothing:  this  community,  calling  it- 
self the  State,  ignores  that  and  claims  the  little 
it  has  left  under  the  pretext  that  it  fears  the 
designs  and  ambitions  of  other  communities 
where  the  great  mass  of  men  and  women  are 
in  much  the  same  plight.  Meanwhile  the 
patriarchal  system  forbids  communication  be- 
tween the  communities,  except  through  very 
narrow  channels,  and  information  about  them 
is  circulated  in  prejudicial  sheets  financed  to 
maintain  the  system.  Thus,  as  far  as  possible, 
by  the  system  individuals  and  communities  are 
kept  apart,  so  that  the  world  is  like  one  vast 
cartel,  a  system  by  which  huge  firms  are  kept 


104         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

in  competition  and  are  only  joined  together  by 
the  fact  that  the  same  financiers  extract  profits 
from  all  of  them.  The  patriarchs,  in  fact,  have 
learned  to  profit  even  from  feuds,  so  successful 
has  been  their  usurpation.  They  keep  human- 
ity perpetually  at  war,  whether  with  lethal  or 
commercial  weapons,  so  that  nothing  but 
profits  are  created.  But  humanity  does  not 
exist  to  create  profits  which  are  only  a  by- 
product. Humanity  lives  to  release  and  cre- 
ate a  spirit,  and  the  time  is  coming  when  that 
purpose  will  be  too  strong  for  the  patriarchs 
and  their  sycoplmnts,  who  will  stand  convicted 
of  mischievous  futility;  and  society  will  then 
have  its  responsibility  wrested  away  from  them 
and  diverted  to  the  individual  for  whom  the 
application  of  the  principle  of  marriage  in 
every  walk  of  life  is  a  necessity:  for  only 
through  it  can  his  conscience  be  kept  alive,  and 
society's  only  source  of  authority  is  the  indi- 
vidual conscience  expressing  itself  through  the 
supple  and  efficient  machinery  of  democratic 
control.  If  the  individual  conscience  is  suf- 
fered to  exist  there  need  be  no  fear  of  the  re- 
ligious and  reverential  emotions  in  men  and 
women  ceasing  to  be  operative  in  human  af- 
fairs.   It  is  when  that  conscience  is  stifled  that 


MARRIAGE  105 

materialism  becomes  rampant  and  men  become 
parasitic  upon  humanity.  To  a  healthy  con- 
science nothing  is  more  abominable  than  a 
parasitic  existence,  and  it  is  only  because  con- 
science is  derided  and  defiled  everywhere  that 
the  present  extraordinary  social  system  exists 
for  the  exploitation  of  mankind  by  man.  With 
the  past  nearly  exhausted  the  present  genera- 
tion, like  its  predecessor,  has  become  parasitic 
upon  the  future,  which  must  inevitably  repu- 
diate it  and  reassert  the  elementary  principles 
that  have  been  forgotten.  The  fantastic  con- 
fusion of  the  present  will  fade  from  men's 
minds  as  they  emerge  into  a  clearer  air,  and  in 
the  huge  effort  to  pay  off  the  debts  of  their 
fathers  they  will  learn  that  joy  is  won  through 
persons  and  not  through  things;  and  that  the 
denial  of  marriage  leads  to  separation,  and  that 
separation  leads  to  slavery. 

The  individual  by  himself  is  soon  caught  in 
his  tyrannous  desire :  wedded  to  his  beloved,  be 
it  a  dream,  a  vision,  a  man,  or  a  woman,  he  is 
one  with  humanity,  and  is  sustained  by  a  force 
that  is  unconquerable.  The  parasite  upon  hu- 
manity perishes  of  his  own  greed:  the  servant 
of  humanity  is  master  of  the  world,  for  all 
things  yield  up  to  him  the  treasure  of  their 


106         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

love,  and  join  their  creative  will  to  his  to  make 
his  life  in  sorrow  and  in  delight  a  marriage 
song. 


VI 
WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS 


VI 

WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS 

There  are  philosophers  who  can  no  more 
endure  women  patiently  than  they  can  the 
toothache,  but  they  lack  the  indulgence  to  see 
that  what  they  detest  in  women  is  not  so  much 
the  brand  of  femininity  as  the  mark  of  slavery. 
The  dishonesty,  the  rapacity,  the  untrust- 
worthiness,  the  shallowness,  the  ferocious  ego- 
ism of  women  are  those  of  all  slaves  who  have 
no  outlet  for  their  passions  save  through  their 
vanity,  which  is  thus  made  to  do  the  work  of 
the  will.  The  slavery  of  women  has  deprived 
men  of  their  free  companionship,  with  the  re- 
sult that  they  have  been  driven  to  make  the 
brain  do  the  work  of  the  mind.  Between  the 
male  brain  and  female  vanity  it  is  small  won- 
der that  a  sorry  mess  has  been  made  of  human 
affairs,  which  have  only  been  saved  from  irre- 
trievable disaster  by  the  fact  that  humanity  as 
a  species  knows  its  business  fairly  well. 

If  their  society  is  to  be  restored  to  sanity, 

109 


110         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

both  men  and  women  have  to  readjust  their 
method  of  living  and  to  discover  a  means  by 
which,  in  pubhc  matters  at  least,  they  can  un- 
derstand each  other,  for  while  men  think  only 
with  their  brains  and  women  with  their  vanity 
they  must  be  hopelessly  at  cross  purposes. 
(The  men  who,  like  women,  think  with  their 
vanity  are  "sports,"  who,  though  frequently 
very  successful,  are  insignificant. )  As  for  life 
under  modern  conditions  vanity  is  a  less  ade- 
quate equipment  than  brain,  it  is  women  who 
are  first  in  moving  towards  a  change,  and  mak- 
ing the  discovery  that  the  will  only  responds  to 
the  call  of  the  mind.  In  their  slavery  they  had 
accepted  that  men  had  a  monopoly  of  mind; 
but  when  under  industrialism  their  slavery  be- 
came desperate,  because  their  work  was  taken 
out  of  their  hands,  they  had  for  a  generation 
or  two  the  leisure  to  consider  the  situation — 
the  handiwork  of  man — and  to  find  out  that 
there  was  no  mind  in  it  whatever,  and  that  such 
will  as  could  be  discerned  was  that  of  the 
species:  no  conscious  will  at  all.  The  shock  of 
it  cracked  the  mirror  of  woman's  vanity,  and 
in  her  discontent  she  began  to  clamour  for  free- 
dom, imagining  that  man  was  withholding  it 
from  her  and  not  suspecting  that  she,  by  ac- 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  111 

cepting  slavery,  was  withholding  it  from  man. 
Such  has  been  the  comedy  of  the  sexes  which 
the  self-conscious  generations  have  mistaken 
for  a  tragedy  so  profound  that  they  have  raised 
sex  to  the  level  of  a  taboo. 

The  development  of  self-consciousness  into 
consciousness  is  the  greatest  effort  of  human- 
ity for  thousands  of  years,  and  it  is  perhaps 
from  exhaustion  after  this  effort  that  so  many 
calamities  are  listlessly  accepted  as  inevi- 
table. The  young  equipped  with  a  new  con- 
sciousness do  not  know  how  to  use  it  in  a  world 
still  dominated  by  the  old.  They  waste  it  in 
wild  experiments  and  in  intellectualising  such 
experience  as  they  can  gather,  though  that  is 
not  much,  as  they  are  thwarted  on  every  side 
by  the  remnants  of  self-consciousness,  and 
their  vision  and  sensations  are  so  novel  that 
they  can  fmd  no  guidance  not  even  in  the  mas- 
terpieces of  art  of  the  ancient  world.  They 
find  themselves  more  akin  to  the  primitives  and 
yet  different  from  them.  They  have  in  living 
something  of  the  joy  of  Heraclitus  in  philos- 
ophy, the  exhilaration  of  being  the  first  to  do 
something.  Their  clucking  is  like  that  of  the 
first  hen  to  lay  the  first  egg  until  they  begin 
to  wonder  whether  they  are  not  after  all  the 


112         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

first  egg.  So  absorbed  have  they  been  with 
their  novelty  that  they  have  passed  through 
the  horror  of  the  war  ahnost  as  a  matter  of 
course,  and  it  has  become  a  screen  between 
them  and  the  old  world.  They  are  not  irri- 
tated or  provoked  by  the  old  people ;  they  sim- 
ply do  not  understand  them,  nor  do  they  want 
to,  except  that  they  realise  that  the  self-con- 
sciousness of  the  old  must  always  have  been  a 
barrier  between  themselves  and  their  lives.  If 
the  old  people  want  power  and  pomp  and  sov- 
ereignty let  them  have  them.  ...  It  is  not 
only  the  intellectuals,  the  intelligentsia,  who 
feel  this,  it  is  the  young  everywhere,  intoxi- 
cated with  their  new  consciousness  and  apt  to 
despise  intelligence,  intellect,  even  imagina- 
tion. Of  course  a  great  deal  of  their  exhilara- 
tion is  illusion,  and  they  do  not  realise  that  a 
great  deal  of  what  they  feel  is  the  will  of  hu- 
manity asserting  itself  after  ages  of  neglect, 
but  they  know  that  it  is  a  force  to  which  they 
can  trust  themselves  absolutely,  even  through 
the  direst  misfortune.  We  are  at  the  beginning 
of  an  age  of  faith,  but  it  is  different  from  its 
predecessors  in  that  the  faith  will  be  conscious 
and  critical,  and  fortified  with  knowledge  and 
scientific  methods  of  increasing  and  applying 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  US 

that  knowledge.  To  the  scientific  study  of  the 
universe  the  young  generation  has  gained  the 
courage  to  add  the  scientific  study  of  human 
nature.  Without  a  conscious  will  the  attempt 
would  be  in  vain,  but  that  has  been  gained,  as 
will  be  acknowledged  later,  through  tlie  self- 
conscious  sufferings  of  the  preceding  genera- 
tions, but  at  present  the  gain  seems  like  a 
miracle  proceeding  from  some  unimaginable 
source.  It  has  as  yet  found  no  expression:  it 
has  been  too  intoxicating  to  leave  room  for 
more  than  living,  but  as  it  gathers  soberness 
there  is  no  doubt  that  it  will  be  absorbed  into 
an  immense  social  effort.  Seeking  God 
through  humanity  it  must  first  make  humanity 
permeable,  and  destroy  the  conditions  which 
make  for  denseness  and  stolidity.  Already  the 
intellectuals  have  accepted  that  as  their  task, 
and  they  set  about  it  with  something  of  the  en- 
thusiasm of  the  Americans  for  commerce  and 
with  much  the  same  machinery,  advertisement 
and  a  card-index.  They  are  content  to  let  the 
Americans  be  the  bagmen  of  the  world.  They 
want  to  be  its  inspiration  and  to  have  that  in- 
spiration creeping  through  every  cranny  of  so- 
ciety. Like  people  enamoured  at  first  sight 
they  are  in  love  with  love,  but  they  want  to 


114         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

understand  love  and  to  be  conscious  through 
every  phase  of  it.  They  accept  the  sway  not 
of  emotions  but  of  a  will,  and  to  that  they  de- 
vote their  passions.  Being  conscious  of  the 
creative  will  in  humanity  they  must,  to  pre- 
serve themselves,  discover  their  own,  and  to 
that  all  their  energies  are  attracted.  Heroes 
and  saints  have  lived  like  that  in  the  past,  but 
with  bitter  agony  and  suffering.  The  danger 
for  the  young  of  this  marv  ellous  time,  this  ad- 
vent of  an  age  of  faith,  is  that  they  live  so 
with  such  ease.  They  have  no  perplexity, 
hardly  a  shadow  of  doubt:  there  is  so  much 
that  they  can  do  without  while  the  growing 
will  broods  within  them,  and  they  can  smile 
happily  at  the  desperate  efforts  of  their  elders 
to  solve  problems  which  do  not  need  solution, 
because  they  will  disappear  when  the  new  or- 
der begin  to  take  shape  and  human  beings  be- 
come conscious  in  selection  of  what  they  want, 
instead  of  taking  a  hundred  different  things 
from  life  in  case  they  should  want  one  of  them. 
.  .  .  These  young  people  are  not  possessive. 
They  do  not  thrust  upon  each  other  what  they 
have,  but  what  they  are.  They  turn  to  each 
other  for  confirmation  of  what  they  believe  to 
be  growing  in  themselves,  and,  finding  it,  they 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  115 

are  reassured  and  smile  happily  and  mys- 
teriously. They  exasperate  their  elders  by 
leaving  undone  that  which  they  ought  to  do, 
by  doing  in  half  an  hour  what  has  traditionally 
been  done  in  a  day,  and  by  striking  out  in 
different  directions  every  hour  or  so.  They 
break  every  convention  and  many  laws,  but 
somehow  they  do  not  come  to  grief  because 
they  believe  they  are  on  the  way  to  a  world  in 
which  men  and  women  will  understand  each 
other.  They  take  understanding  for  granted, 
and  even  from  the  most  unexpected  and  con- 
ventional persons  it  is  forthcoming.  Even  the 
old  are  learning  to  appreciate  the  confidence 
with  which  the  young  face  disaster,  and  to  real- 
ise that  it  is  a  stronger  power  than  calculation 
because  it  has  no  need  to  encroach  on  moral 
capital. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  confidence  of  the 
young  is  perhaps  excessive.  They  have  more 
to  learn  than  they  will  admit,  and  they  rely 
too  much  upon  intellectual  formulation.  But 
whatever  the  tragedies  their  faults  may  bring 
about  they  will  meet  them  face  to  face  and  not 
leave  them  to  go  dragging  on  through  the  gen- 
erations. Their  situation  is  such  that  they 
must  do  this,  for  they  are  charged  with  a  direct 


116         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

responsibility  to  humanity:  they  have  no 
church,  no  nation,  no  group  to  which  their  loy- 
alty can  be  diverted.  The  powers  of  work  at 
their  disposal  have  broken  down  frontiers  and 
barriers. 

I  As  women  have  had  less  to  unlearn  than 
men  they  are  the  more  ready  to  assume  this 
new  citizenship  that  has  been  created  out  of 
the  world's  agony.  Their  desire  for  it,  already 
awake  before  the  catastrophe,  is  no  longer 
thwarted  by  the  institutions  and  prejudices  of 
the  old  world,  and  they  no  longer  need  to  waste 
energy  in  fighting  as  yoimg  men  must  against 
tradition,  not  to  destroy  it  but  to  wring  from 
it  what  is  valid  for  the  present  and  the  future. 
Women,  therefore,  can  bring  into  public  af- 
fairs a  freshness  and  eagerness  of  desire  that 
have  been  far  to  seek,  and  they  also  bring 
into  the  open  the  secret  knowledge  of  the  ways 
of  men  which  hitherto  they  have  used  to  defend 
themselves.  Men  reveal  themselves  to  women 
as  they  never  do  to  each  other,  and  with  women 
admitted  to  the  councils  of  humanity  the  need 
for  a  great  deal  of  bluff  and  blague  disappears. 
To  a  smaller  degree  the  same  is  true  from  the 
other  side,  and  the  many  little  conspiracies  of 
women  drop  out  from  the  machinery  of  social 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  llT 

intercourse.  A  big  step  has  been  taken  to- 
wards collective  honesty,  which,  like  everything 
else  collective,  depends  upon  the  necessities  of 
the  individual,  which  have  been  relieved  more 
by  the  evolutionary  raising  of  the  status  of 
women  than  by  any  other  factor  in  the  great 
development  now  in  progress.  To  this  more 
than  to  anything  else  is  due  the  release  of  con- 
sciousness which  has  made  it  possible  for  hu- 
manity to  turn  from  the  exploration  of  the 
earth  to  that  of  human  experience. 

At  the  same  time  it  has  to  be  remembered 
that  times  of  spiritual  release  bring  great  illu- 
sions which  always  receive  the  warmest  wel- 
come in  the  most  eager  minds,  and  it  is  likely 
that  much  of  what  women  gain  in  freedom  will 
be  lost  in  self-deception,  and  their  contribution 
to  society  may  for  a  long  time  be  thwarted  by 
themselves  as  they  gradually  transfer  their 
power  of  passionate  concentration  from  indi- 
vidual human  beings  to  humanity,  but  they 
themselves  will  make  that  easier  as  they  bring 
to  light  the  discomforts  and  crushing  depriva- 
tions from  which  they  have  long  suffered  in 
silence.  Above  all,  they  will  bring  into  the 
scheme  of  politics  a  care  for  children  which  has 
for  too  long  been  absent.    Without  that  care 


118        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

it  has  been  impossible  to  find  any  true  orienta- 
tion for  public  affairs,  and  no  religion — be- 
cause reUgions  have  kept  women  in  subjection 
and  used  their  power  of  devotion  to  create  or- 
ganisation— has  been  strong  enough  to  make 
the  Holy  Family  a  valid  sjTnbol  of  worship. 
Religion  has  taken  from  society  its  most  fiery 
force,  the  reproductive  instinct,  and  spent  it 
upon  thin  air.  For  the  lack  of  it  men  have 
been  working  unsupported  in  a  kind  of  void 
and  have  depended  too  exclusively  upon  the 
creative  powers  of  men  of  genius,  always  too 
far  ahead  of  their  contemporaries  to  be  able 
directly  to  serve  them;  so  that,  in  fact,  two 
societies  have  been  created,  one  in  which  art- 
ists, prophets  and  seers  have  dwelt  in  equality, 
and  another  which  is  a  spurious  imitation  of  it 
in  which  men  of  action  imitate  the  greatness 
without  having  the  force  of  these  others,  and 
set  up  tyranny  in  the  place  of  authority.  A 
tyranny,  even  with  the  support  of  the  greatest 
number,  has  no  authority,  and  it  is  the  tragedy 
of  the  nineteenth  century  that  it  followed  Na- 
poleon instead  of  Goethe.  The  glory  of  a 
Napoleon  fades,  while  that  of  a  Goethe  in- 
creases in  perennial  fecundity;  but  the  slave 
mind  in  its  stunted  ignorance  is  always  so  daz- 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  119 

zled  by  a  successful  tyranny  that  it  cannot  see 
the  light  of  authority,  and  women  hitherto 
have  been  slaves,  the  slaves  of  a  system  even 
when  they  have  gained  the  freedom  of  love. 
They  are  skilled  in  self -martyrdom,  apt  in  im- 
molation, acknowledging  loyalty  to  husbands, 
lovers,  or  children ;  but  blind  to  any  larger  loy- 
alty, often  bringing  ruin  when  they  seem  most 
noble,  because  their  virtues  are  that  of  the 
sham  society  which  has  imposed  itself  on  the 
true,  largely  through  their  docile  acceptance  of 
the  theatricality  with  which  men  have  deceived 
themselves  and  falsified  their  values.  That 
sham  society  has  been  like  a  film  overlaying 
life,  but  with  the  inmiense  movement  of  the 
soul  by  which  women  have  gained  a  new  status, 
the  film  has  been  broken  and  the  lighfof  au- 
thority set  up  by  generations  of  work  can  shine 
through  to  the  humblest  life.  Once  it  becomes 
clear  that  work  is  the  only  available  authority 
it  is  apparent  that  circulation  of  work  is  to 
society  what  the  circulation  of  the  blood  is  to 
the  human  body,  and  as  work  has  extended  in 
its  effects  from  community  to  community 
everything  that  impedes  its  circulation  has  to 
give  way.  Accordingly  a  system  which  at- 
tempted to  confine  women  to  their  natural 


120        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

functions  could  not  but  break  under  that  in- 
creasing pressure  which  demanded  also  the  la- 
bour of  women.  It  is  the  health-giving  quality 
of  work  (as  distinct  from  drudgery)  that  it 
makes  the  individual  who  does  it  insist  that  it 
shall  be  done  upon  honourable  conditions,  be- 
cause a  man  or  a  woman  can  pocket  his  or  her 
personal  pride ;  but  pride  of  work  cannot  be  so 
sunmiarily  dealt  with,  for,  consciously  or  un- 
consciously, it  entails  pride  in  humanity  and 
establishes,  perhaps,  even  more  clearly  than 
love,  contact  with  the  creative  will.  That  con- 
tact is  more  living  in  women  than  in  men 
through  their  child-bearing  instinct,  and  when 
this  is  fortified  with  contact  through  pride  of 
work  a  formidable  power  is  released.  Already 
under  the  old  system  there  were  common  in- 
stances of  tliis  in  the  successful  mother  who 
was  also  house-proud.  When  women  have  in 
society  the  same  pride  that  they  have  in  the 
orderliness  of  the  home,  then  they  will  not 
waste  so  much  time  as  they  do  now  in  trying 
to  understand  the  jargon  with  which  for  ages 
men  have  vainly  been  attempting  to  under- 
stand each  other.  Political  economy  should 
then  receive  the  necessary  corrective  from  do- 
mestic experience,  and  we  might  even  be  on  the 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  121 

road  to  the  evolution  of  a  sound  finance  which 
would  put  an  end  to  the  old  trouble  of  money 
that  there  is  always  too  much  of  it  or  too  little. 

It  must  be  in  the  experience  of  every  mar- 
ried woman  to  have  seen  her  husband's  swag- 
ger ooze  away  as  the  pressure  of  their  difficult 
relationship  forced  him  into  surrender  to  the 
inexorable  fact  that  his  success  as  a  human 
being  depends  upon  his  success  as  a  husband 
and  father.  Something  like  that  has  happened 
between  the  sexes  in  these  crucial  years.  Men 
have  been  forced  to  face  the  truth  that  they 
and  their  handiwork  depend  upon  their  rela- 
tionship with  women.  If  that  is  false,  so  will 
be  their  doing.  The  upshot  of  this  discovery  is 
the  further  revelation  that  humanity  is  deeper 
than  sex. 

Women,  one  suspects,  have  known  that  all 
the  time,  and  have  worked  through  sex,  while 
men  have  always  been  inclined  to  run  away 
from  it.  The  pity  of  it  has  been  that  women 
have  not  wanted  anything  much.  They  have 
bowed  too  humbly  to  the  natural  law  which 
limits  their  fecundity  to  the  thirty  years  be- 
tween fifteen  and  forty-five,  and  have  over- 
looked the  fact  that,  while  their  maturity  be- 
gins soon  after  twenty,  that  of  a  man  does  not 


122         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

begin  until  he  has  passed  thirty,  so  that  in  any 
generation  responsibihty  first  falls  upon  the 
women.  To  that  may  be  due  some  of  the  jeal- 
ousy between  the  sexes,  but  if  responsibility 
begins  with  the  women  of  a  generation  it  ends 
with  the  men,  and  both  need  the  support  of 
the  other. 

Recognition  of  these  facts,  points,  like  that 
of  other  salient  facts,  to  education  as  the  sol- 
vent of  the  difficulty  and  as  the  road  leading 
from  a  congested  existence  to  a  free  life.  The 
education  of  the  last  fifty  years  was  necessi- 
tated by  the  recognition  of  the  facts  adduced 
by  science  working  upon  the  phenomena  of 
Nature.  The  facts  revealed  by  the  operation 
of  science  upon  human  nature  necessitate  a 
new  phase  of  education,  which  must  take  its 
character  from  the  new  needs  of  women  as  citi- 
zens and  break  away  from  the  traditions  that 
have  grown  out  of  the  education  of  men  rooted 
in  religion,  which,  drawing  its  sustenance  from 
the  captivity  of  women,  has  no  more  to  give  to 
humanity.  The  price  of  material  progress  and 
physical  adventure  was  the  subjection  of 
women.  That  price  has  been  paid  in  full,  and 
the  desire  and  the  will  of  humanity  is  for  spir- 
itual adventure,  and  the  price  of  that  is  the 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  123 

price  of  liberty — eternal  vigilance.  That,  in 
every  generation,  as  we  have  seen,  begins  with 
the  women  and  ends  with  the  men,  and  both 
must  be  trained  for  it,  and  their  training  is  the 
first  charge  upon  the  efforts  of  humanity. 

It  is  true  that  defence  comes  before  opu- 
lence, but  the  only  defence  of  humanity  is  edu- 
cation, for  without  that  one  generation  will 
always  defend  itself  at  the  cost  of  the  next  in 
defiance  of  justice  and  to  the  lasting  injury  of 
liberty.  To  the  present  generation  these  truths 
have  been  brought  home  in  bitter  fashion,  and 
the  young  women  of  to-day  entering  upon  citi- 
zenship are  vigilant  in  their  guard  of  the  free- 
dom they  have  won,  not  only  for  themselves, 
but  also  for  men  who  could  never  be  free  while 
their  efforts  were  based  upon  the  subjection 
of  those  who  should  be  most  deeply  their  com- 
panions. With  the  needs  of  women  ennobled 
by  freedom,  those  of  men  become  subject  to 
fundamental  emendation:  the  need  of  wisdom 
is  increased,  that  of  physical  wealth  reduced, 
since  a  man  must  henceforth  win  by  his  char- 
acter that  respect  which  hitherto  has  been  too 
easily  given  to  his  property.  With  women  no 
longer  property  the  value  of  property  dimin- 
ishes, the  conceptions  based  on  it  lose  their 


lU        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

force,  and  socially  influence  becomes  a  greater 
thing  than  power.  No  man  with  force  or  eco- 
nomic pressure  at  the  back  of  his  mind  can 
utter  the  true  word  which  again  and  again  in 
history  has  shown  itself  mightier  than  force; 
and  it  is  by  the  true  word  that  henceforth  hu- 
manity must  be  governed,  because  the  violence 
of  men  reacts  always  to  their  own  hurt.  With 
women  entering  upon  citizenship  violence  re- 
ceives a  check,  and  the  untruth  with  which  it 
is  excused  and  maintained  will  be  speedily  re- 
duced to  absurdity  by  the  art  learned  by 
women  in  their  slavery  of  supporting  male  fic- 
tions even  after  the  need  for  them  has  ceased, 
until,  without  a  word,  they  are  exposed.  Life 
is  a  comedy,  and  it  is  tragic  only  in  so  far  as 
men  and  women  fail  at  crucial  moments  to 
summon  up  the  vitality  necessary  to  meet 
them.  Then  the  conventions  break,  passions 
snap  control,  and  the  brutality  of  human  na- 
ture for  a  time  holds  sway.  On  the  whole 
women  are  better  comedians  than  men,  more 
tenacious,  tougher  and  more  courageous;  and 
even  as  slaves  they  have  been  marvellously 
acute  in  giving  men  what  they  want  ratlier  than 
what  they  think  they  want.  These  powers  of 
theirs  have  hitherto  been  confined  to  the  fam- 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  125 

ily,  but  the  family  has  been  absorbed  into  the 
industrialised  community,  which,  for  lack  of 
making  a  proper  use  of  women,  has  come  to 
grief.  The  omission  is  being  repaired.  The 
advent  of  women  as  citizens  releases  men  for 
further  and  higher  adventures,  which,  prop- 
erly directed,  should  make  the  world  a  place 
greater  than  was  ever  dreamed  of  by  those 
who,  as  feudalism  fell  away  into  the  piast, 
strove  to  mark  out  for  humanity  the  direction 
of  its  destiny. 

The  gentleness  of  women  is  largely  a  male 
fiction.  They  have  a  ferocity  and  a  hardness 
which,  turned  in  the  right  path,  are  the  very 
qualities  needed  for  breaking  through  the  con- 
fused thoughts  and  emotions  which  are  hu- 
manity's legacy  from  the  misfortunes  of  the 
past.  Their  experience  has  made  them  realis- 
tic, perhaps  a  little  cynical  and  suspicious  of 
the  too  easy  idealism  in  which  men  have  been 
accustomed  to  take  refuge.  Above  all,  they 
know  only  too  well  that  bills  have  to  be  paid, 
and  that  recklessness  in  public  affairs  reacts 
fatally  upon  the  price  of  food.  They  know 
that  before  anything  else  is  attempted,  chil- 
dren must  be  fed  and  clothed.  They  are  the 
last  to  emerge  from  f eudahsm,  and  they  should 


126        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

bring  into  the  new  society  something  of  the 
spirit  that  animated  the  old,  something  of  the 
pride  that  built  in  every  communitj^  a  house  of 
God  and  made  it  nobler  than  any  house  built 
for  man.  It  is  for  lack  of  this  that  communal 
buildings  in  the  modern  world  are  so  ignoble. 
They  are  built  only  to  serve  the  practical 
needs  of  men  without  reference  to  their  service 
of  a  power  greater  than  themselves,  without 
which — so  nicely  adjusted  are  the  laws  of  hu- 
manity— they  cannot  gain  even  their  own  ad- 
vantage. Women  serving  the  family  have  that 
ingrained  in  them,  and,  turned  to  the  service 
of  humanity,  they  will  gain  the  support  of  hu- 
manity's creative  will.  Theirs  is  the  power, 
theirs  should  be  the  desire,  and  with  them  rests 
the  immediate  responsibility  for  the  fate  of  the 
next  few  generations.  With  them  largely 
rests  the  task  of  rebuilding  society  from  the 
bottom  up,  so  that  when  the  superstructure 
collapses,  as  it  inevitably  must,  there  shall  re- 
main a  finer  edifice.  While  the  new  society 
is  built  we  have  to  dwell  in  the  ruins  of  the  old. 
The  important  thing  in  society  is  not  political 
institutions,  but  the  lives  of  the  millions  of 
workers  which  go  on  much  the  same  whatever 
happens.    It  is  out  of  them  that  the  communal 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  m 

life  grows,  and  it  will  be  the  first  duty  of 
women  to  see  that  the  new  communal  life 
is  not  divorced  from  them  as  the  old  has  been, 
and  most  probably  the  first  field  of  their  ener- 
gies will  be  the  schools  which  have  to  be  re- 
claimed from  the  old  communal  life.  That  is 
the  key  to  the  reorganisation  of  social  ma- 
chinery. Reclaim  the  schools  and  the  rest  fol- 
lows. Every  village,  every  parish,  should  have 
a  school  in  which  it  can  take  a  pride  as  the  in- 
stitution through  which  the  conmiunity  ac- 
knowledges its  responsibility  for  the  children, 
who,  after  the  first  few  years,  need  more  than 
their  parents  can  possibly  give  them.  With 
the  community  accepting  responsibility,  the 
parents  are  then  released  to  achieve  a  greater 
fulfilment  of  their  lives  than  if  they  are  crushed 
by  the  burdens  imposed  on  them  by  the  exer- 
cise of  their  natural  functions.  Again,  it  can- 
not be  too  often  repeated  that  the  purpose  of 
society  is  to  save  men  and  women  from  being 
overwhelmed  by  their  responsibilities.  Society, 
indeed,  has  grown  out  of  the  poohng  of  respon- 
sibihties,  and  again  it  must  be  repeated  that  its 
sole  sanction  is  work.  The  release  of  women 
has  come  about  through  their  being  deprived 
of  the  work  imposed  on  them  by  the  feudal 


128         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

family.  They  have  claimed  and  won  the  right 
to  contribute  their  work,  over  and  above  the 
bearing  and  care  of  children,  to  the  industrial 
community.  With  their  victory  ends  the  close 
division  of  humanity  into  nations;  and  human- 
ity has  entered  upon  a  phase  when  it  can  be 
acknowledged,  practically  as  well  as  ideally, 
that  the  industrial  community  and  it  are  one. 
Women  then  must  either  be  citizens  of  the 
world  or  slaves;  and  if  they  meet  the  latter  fate> 
with  them  the  whole  will  dwindle  away  from 
its  destiny  and  the  races  will  have  entered  upon 
the  process  of  disintegration. 

Coming  fresh  to  citizenship,  it  is  likely  that 
women  may  be  able  to  supply  that  civic  sense 
which  is  so  painfully  lacking  in  the  organisa- 
tions of  Capital  and  Labour,  both  of  whom — 
naturally  enough  in  a  competitive  state  of  so- 
ciety— aim  at  getting  as  much  as  ever  they  can 
for  their  women  and  children  to  secure  them 
against  poverty.  Remove  poverty  and  you  re- 
move the  necessity  for  organisation  against  it. 
Organisation  can  then  be  used  for  fruitful  pur- 
poses. Women  who  are  used  to  being  sup- 
ported may  remove  from  the  male  mind  the 
objection  to  the  idea  of  it.  Every  human  be- 
ing is,  in  fact,  supported  by  humanity,  but  it 


WOMEN  AS  CITIZENS  129 

has  been  the  custom  to  ignore  that  fact.  Admit 
it  and  there  can  come  into  social  thought  the 
simplification  which  scientific  discoveries  have 
brought  about  in  philosophy.  The  refusal  to 
admit  it,  the  jealous  preservation  of  sov- 
ereignty is  the  chief  stumbling-block  in  the 
way  of  the  unification  of  society.  Women  have 
a  certain  skill  in  painlessly  picking  obstinate 
ideas  out  of  the  fliinds  of  men,  who  often  cling 
to  them  out  of  an  unnecessary  chivalry.  Let 
it  be  so  now  and  the  world  will  be  immeasur- 
ably the  gainer. 

Above  all,  women  are  subject  to  psychic 
storms  which  clear  the  air,  become  fouled  and 
poisonous  wherever  human  beings  are  gathered 
together.  The  brooding  thought  of  women 
breaks  in  them  and  fertilises  the  seeds  of 
thought  in  men,  bringing  forth  what  else  re- 
mained concealed,  or  covered  up  in  uncon- 
sciousness. Many  a  woman,  even  where  she 
eould  not  understand,  has  counted  her  life  well 
lived  because  she  was  once  the  occasion  of  softie 
germination  in  the  soul  of  a  man.  It  is  among 
the  profoundest  needs  of  a  woman  and  gives 
her  her  most  subtle  powers.  Let  them  be  used 
for  the  community,  as  they  must  when  women 
begin  to  live  socially,  and  a  great  source  of 


130        THE  ANATOAfif  OF  SOCIETY 

power  that  is  now  almost  entirely  wasted  can 
give  its  energy  to  the  working  of  the  whole. 

It  becomes  clear,  then,  that  men  and  women 
must  more  and  more  be  allowed  to  govern 
themselves,  to  create  and  adapt  the  machinery 
they  need  for  the  satisfaction  of  their  require- 
ments, and  that  social  philosophy  must  ad- 
vance to  this  from  the  idea  of  getting  out  of 
men  and  women  as  much  as  possible  for  as  lit- 
tle as  possible.  There  is  no  reason  why,  in 
time,  society  should  not  be  as  supple  and  as 
varied  as  life  itself,  giving  back  an  hundred- 
fold the  work  that  is  put  into  it. 


VII 
SCIENCE  AND  ART 


VII 

SCIENCE  AND  AKT 

As  old  sanctions  and  authorities  pass  away 
hasty  attempts  are  made  to  replace  them,  but 
with  the  crumbling  of  institutions  there  is  an 
end  of  the  ideas  by  which  they  were  sustained. 
As  small  communities  are  merged  in  larger, 
and  the  single  human  community  appears  to 
view,  it  becomes  clear  that  it  has  always  ex- 
isted, and  that  it  has  been  supported,  though 
all  others  were  unfaithful,  by  the  thinkers,  who 
have  been  to  all  appearances  a  community 
apart,  doing  its  work  unrecognised  and  yet  un- 
consciously honoured  in  the  homage,  usually 
posthumous,  paid  to  great  men,  who,  being  of 
all  human  beings  the  most  human,  have  met 
the  ironic  fate  of  being  treated  as  demi-gods 
and  given  a  reverence  of  the  kind  accorded  to 
potentates,  though  nothing  could  be  farther 
from  the  recognition  of  their  seeking,  since 
they,  of  all  men,  have  understood  and  prac- 
tised democracy  and  co-operation  when  other 

133 


134         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

workers  were  lost  in  the  mazes  of  competition. 
There  has  always  been  an  international  com- 
munity, for  the  imagination  overleaps  the  bar- 
riers set  up  on  the  ways  of  common  trade,  and 
there  is  no  property  in  ideas  round  which  jeal- 
ous defences  can  be  set  up.  Confucius  and 
Kant  work  together,  regardless  of  the  fron- 
tiers  of  time  and  place,  and  they  work  togethef 
as  all  men  should  for  hmnanity.  It  has  always 
been  so  and  always  the  discoverers  have  been 
opposed  by  those  whose  profit  seems  to  lie  in 
thwarting  change  and  readjustment,  but 
though  jealous  communities  are  composed  and 
decomposed,  theirs  persists  as  the  grand  model 
which  humanity  through  all  its  upheavals  must 
emulate.  Here,  then,  is  a  conmiunity  inspired 
by  the  authority  of  work,  and  it  has  always 
put  all  other  authorities  to  shame,  and  has,  in- 
deed, been  stronger  than  any  code  of  law  ever 
devised;  but  from  the  minds  of  the  great  mass 
of  men  its  existence  has  been  concealed,  and 
thinkers  and  artists  have  always  been  presented 
to  them  as  isolated  wonders,  creatures  almost 
of  another  sort,  though  their  sole  privilege  has 
been  a  greater  sensibility  to  the  tides  that  move 
in  humanity.  Here,  then,  in  works  of  philos- 
ophy, art,  music,  is  the  authority  that  is  needed. 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  136 

With  the  single  community  acknowledged,  the 
workers  in  science  and  art  can  follow  their  call- 
ing in  the  open,  and  so  soon  as  the  Law,  de- 
vised to  protect  property,  is  adapted  to  the 
protection  of  work,  they  will  be  able  to  estab- 
lish what  is  lacking  now — direct  contact  with 
the  lives  of  common  men — and  no  longer  be 
dependent  upon  the  caprices  of  politicians. 
This  does  not  mean  that  government  should 
be  handed  over  to  the  artists  and  scientists. 
Government  and  authority  are  two  very  differ- 
ent things.  The  work  of  the  artists  and  scien- 
tists is  the  maintenance  of  authority  without 
which  there  can  be  no  good  government. 
Truth  has  to  be  re-stated  for  every  generation, 
for  no  two  generations  speak  the  same  lan- 
guage. In  the  decaying  years  of  feudalism 
government  usurped  the  position  of  authority, 
and  that  usurpation  has  to  be  removed.  It  can 
only  be  done  in  one  way,  and  that  slowly,  by 
education,  that  is  by  helping  the  people  to  un- 
derstand such  truth  as  is  revealed  to  them.  A 
great  discoverer  is  unintelligible  to  his  contem- 
poraries, but  it  is  always  possible  for  them  to 
appreciate  the  tradition  that  has  made  his  work 
possible.  The  tradition  of  science  and  art  is  a 
far  greater  thing  than  any  national  tradition, 


136         THE  ANATOIVIY  OF  SOCIETY 

and  it  is  in  this  that  children  should  be  edu- 
cated, for  without  understanding  of  the  great- 
er there  can  be  no  true  appreciation  of  the  less. 
If,  for  instance,  there  was  ever  a  true  King 
of  England  his  name  was  William  phake^ 
speare;  and  President  Wilson,  in  speaking 
nobly  for  America,  is  the  mouthpiece  of  Walt 
Whitman.  The  destiny  of  humanity  is  shaped 
by  vision,  not  by  Law,  which  should  be  the 
means  by  which  the  vision  is  expressed  in  daily 
life.  Laws  which  subserv^e  the  purposes  of 
temporal  power  thwart  the  operation  of  vision 
and  injure  daily  life,  lead  to  the  destruction  of 
imagination,  and  blight  the  hopes  of  the  fu- 
ture. Vision  and  the  pressure  of  daily  life  lead 
slowly  to  inventions  which  the  generations  are 
apt  to  regard  as  their  sole  unaided  work,  but, 
as  we  have  seen,  no  work  is  unaided,  all  work 
is  done  in  common,  and  all  work  depends  upon 
that  of  the  community  of  artists  and  scientists, 
where  there  is  emulation  but  no  competition. 
The  spirit  of  competition,  which  is  so  ardently 
defended  by  those  whose  fortune  depends  on 
it,  is  the  outcome  partly  of  jealousy,  partly  of 
the  cruel  system  by  which  a  man  is  solely  re- 
sponsible for  his  wife  and  family.  That  sys- 
tem has  been  overthrown  by  the  insurrection 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  137 

of  women,  and  a  new  system  of  common  re- 
sponsibility is  coming  into  being.  In  the  com- 
munity of  artists  and  scientists  that  system  has 
always  prevailed,  since  without  acceptance  of 
it  nothing  can  be  done.  Artists  and  scientists 
are  allied  in  defence  of  the  human  spirit  as 
expressed  in  ideas :  following  their  example  all 
men  should  be  joined  together  in  their  work 
in  defence  of  that  spirit  as  expressed  in  flesh 
and  blood.  The  system  is  the  same,  only  the 
medium  is  different.  Without  system  nothing 
is  accomplished,  and  without  consciousness  of 
tradition  no  truth  can  be  revealed.  Unity  can 
only  be  achieved  through  devotion  which  is  na- 
tive to  every  human  heart.  The  pity  of  it  is 
that  so  few  have  the  courage  of  it,  but  by  the 
revelation  of  the  community  of  science  and  art 
that  can  be  fortified,  and  men  can  be  given 
what  they  most  need:  the  sense  of  serving 
something  beyond  the  purpose  immediately  be- 
fore them.  That  sense  has  in  Europe  been 
monstrously  abused  by  the  doctrine  of  the  sov- 
ereign state,  which  has  been  suffered  to  absorb 
into  itself  both  the  sovereignty  of  the  individ- 
ual and  the  sovereignty  of  humanity,  which 
are  the  two  shining  principles  of  the  com- 
munity of  the  artists  and  scientists.    Without 


138        THE  ANATO^IY  OF  SOCIETY 

them  life  is  reduced  to  nonsense,  and  the  blind 
instinct  of  humanity  has  wasted  four  years  and 
millions  of  lives  in  attempting  to  destroy  it — 
in  the  WTong  way.  A  perversion  that  has  grown 
through  generations  cannot  be  destroyed  in  a 
moment,  and  it  certainly  cannot  be  removed 
by  the  exhaustion  of  the  young  life  which  is  its 
natural  enemy,  yet,  iSiough  the  waste  has  been 
disproportionate,  there  has  been  this  much 
gained :  that  the  perversion  is  revealed  for  what 
it  is,  and  the  distortion  of  society  through  it 
has  become  patent.  Nowhere  is  this  more  so 
than  in  the  quarrel  to  which  it  has  given  rise 
between  the  brain-workers  and  the  hand-work- 
ers of  the  world,  revealing  the  hideous  fact  that 
for  two  or  three  generations  the  executive 
brain-work  of  the  world  has  been  neglected, 
owing  to  the  ease  with  which,  on  paper,  satis- 
factory results  could  be  obtained  by  leaving  it 
to  the  automatic  working  of  commercial  and 
social  machinery.  The  complaint  of  the  hand- 
workers is  just.  They  have  been  as  grievously 
betrayed  by  the  executive  brain-workers  of  the 
world  as  ever  the  peasants  of  the  feudal  sys- 
tem were  by  the  barons,  priests  and  kings  who 
swindled  them  in  the  name  of  religion.  The 
brain-workers  have  exacted  vast  payment  for 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  139 

work  that  they  have  left  undone,  and  the  bur- 
den laid  upon  the  industrial  millions  is  intoler- 
able. They  in  their  ignorance  imagine  despair- 
ingly that  they  must  take  unto  themselves  the 
brain-work  for  which  they  are  so  ill-equipped. 
They  know  perfectly  well  that  men  and  classes 
who  have  lost  the  habit  of  work  cannot  regain 
it;  and  they  do  not  know  where  to  turn,  be- 
cause they  are  unaware  of  the  community  of 
artists  and  scientists  who,  through  all  the 
abuses  of  society,  have  kept  alive  the  principle 
of  loyalty  to  the  human  spirit.  Between  the 
hand-workers  and  that  community  stands 
everywhere  the  indolent  class  which  knows  no 
loyalty.  Meanwhile  to  defend  themselves  the 
hand-workers  have  thrown  up  their  own  brain- 
workers  to  protect  them  as  a  class  against  the 
depredations  of  the  indolent  and  irresponsible, 
whose  economic  status  gives  them  so  devasr 
tating  a  power;  but  without  the  authority  of 
art  and  science  these  brain-workers  also  can- 
not but  become  predatory,  and  becoming  so 
they  will  cease  to  work.  That  is  inevitable  in 
any  community  in  which  work  is  not  gradually 
refined  until  it  flowers  naturally  and  beauti- 
fully in  art.  Without  such  gradual  refinement 
art  becomes  a  plaything.    Indeed,  art  has  only 


140         THE  ANATOjMY  OF  SOCIETY 

flourished  when  by  accident  a  community  has 
for  a  tirtie  achieved  this  condition  through  some 
fleeting  inspiration.  There  are  always,  and 
always  will  be,  loyal  workers  in  art  to  keep  its 
tradition  alive,  but  achievement  depends  upon 
the  health  of  the  community,  which  cannot  al- 
ways be  measured  by  external  events.  There 
are  obstacles  which  genius  cannot  surmount. 

The  hand-workers  of  the  world  are  aware 
that  more  than  material  comfort  has  been 
withheld  from  them.  They  know  that  econo- 
mic justice  alone  cannot  satisfy  them.  They 
know  that  the  truth  of  their  generation  has 
been  kept  from  them.  They  are  beginning  to 
perceive  that  just  as  their  work  was  on  the 
point  of  breaking  through  national  boundaries 
those  boundaries  were  strengthened,  and  that 
the  wealth  that  should  have  removed  them  was 
used  to  turn  therft  into  battlefields,  and  they 
know  that  life  has  become  as  barren  as  those 
burned  and  scarred  areas.  It  is  welling  up  in 
their  minds  that  only  brain-work  can  repair 
this  monstrous  damage,  and  that  they  are  in  the 
hands  of  people  who  cannot  use  their  brains, 
people  incapable  of  suffering,  egoists,  un- 
happy, inert;  and  they  are  realising  that  these 
people  are  the  boundaries  which  they  have  been 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  141 

urged  to  defend.  The  earth  on  one  side  of  a 
river  is  the  same  as  that  on  the  other;  the  two 
sides  of  a  mountain  reach  to  the  same  summit, 
but  the  people  may  not  reach  the  summit  be- 
cause they  may  not  trespass  on  the  pleasure- 
grounds  that  bask  in  the  sunlight  of  the  slopes. 
They  have  been  taught  that  art  also  is  a  pleas- 
ure-ground on  which  they  may  not  trespass, 
and  this  is  the  most  shameful  lie  of  all.  They 
have  been  led  to  think  that  science  is  a  dark- 
ness and  a  menace  from  which  they  must  keep 
their  eyes  averted,  and  they  have  behind  them 
generations  of  the  habit  of  docility;  but,  once 
it  becomes  plain  that  they  are  separated  only 
by  the  inertia  of  a  few  thousand  people,  then 
energy  will  leap  in  them  to  ally  their  labour 
with  that  of  the  artists  and  scientists,  where 
alone  they  can  find  the  brain-work  without 
which  they  cannot  find  escape  from  the  dishon- 
ourable condition  thrust  upon  them  by  the  in- 
compatible alliance  of  honest  work  and  com- 
mercial cunning  which  at  present  governs  hu- 
manity. 

The  split,  then,  is  between  honesty  and  dis- 
honesty, the  growing  decency  of  private  life 
and  the  increasing  corruption  in  public  ajffairs. 
Assertive  nationalism  in  vain  attempts  to  con- 


142         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

ceal  the  true  nature  of  the  division,  and  the 
fact  that  behind  the  demand  of  the  hand-work- 
ers are  imperishable  moral  principles  and  the 
insistence  of  the  human  conscience  upon  the 
social  contract.  There  may,  there  probably 
will,  be  compromise,  but  the  outcome  will  be, 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  an  admission  that 
humanity  is  greater  than  any  portion  of  it,  and 
some  glimmering  of  the  truth  that  artists  have 
maintained  ever  since  the  human  mind  was  kin- 
dled by  the  glow  that  comes  from  work  hon- 
estly and  honourably  carried  out.  That  is  the 
sole  light  in  our  darkness.  Love  contains  no 
other  illumination.  The  task  of  science  and 
art  is  simply  to  increase  that  light,  that  under- 
standing may  increase  to  bring  to  greater  per- 
fection the  marriage  of  the  inward  beauty  of 
the  soul  with  the  overwhelming  beauty  of  the 
universe.  Without  such  marriage  men  and 
women  are  overcome,  their  passions  smoulder 
away  and  are  never  fully  used  in  the  service 
to  which  in  their  birth  they  are  dedicated. 
They  remain  the  victims  of  fear,  and  are  only 
allied  to  their  fellows  in  panic,  when  they 
should  be  continuously  joined  in  devotion. 

There  is  much  lamentation  over  the  decay  of 
religion  in  the  industrial  community;  but  re- 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  148 

ligion  that  denies  art  and  science  must  decay, 
because  it  attempts  to  deny  Man's  approach 
through  humanity  to  the  highest  mysteries,  as 
if  any  other  way  were  open  to  him.  The  re- 
ligious impulse  awakened  and  yet  given  no 
channel  simply  reacts  in  misery,  for  it  springs 
from  the  instinct  of  love  and  is  creative,  and 
cannot  rest  content  with  expression  in  an  act 
of  vacant  worship.  Prayer  clarifies  the  soul 
for  action — as  the  soul  understands  action, 
swift,  direct,  yet  patient  and  indomitable;  but 
if  the  mind  be  darkened  the  soul  is  impeded  and 
doomed  to  disappointment.  Art  and  science, 
being  work  at  its  highest,  bring  the  only  avail- 
able illumination  to  the  darkened  mind,  and  a 
religion  which  denies  them  deprives  all  other 
work  of  its  illuminating  power  and  leaves  the 
soul  dependent  upon  the  fitful  fire  of  the  pas- 
sions. Action  then  becomes  spasmodic  and  un- 
intelligible, discouraging  and  baffling  rather 
than  inspiring,  and  the  soul  gains  no  strength 
but  gradually  weakens,  and  the  burden  of  hu- 
manity is  increased.  How  cruel,  then,  is  it  for 
religion,  pretending  to  care  for  the  soul,  to 
deprive  it  of  its  only  sustenance;  and  what 
miseries,  what  disasters  does  it  prepare  through 
its  arrogance  I    Art  was  once  the  handmaid  of 


144.        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

religion,  but  art  fortified  by  science  is  denied 
by  the  institutions  to  which  religion  has  given 
birth.  In  the  education  grudgingly  allowed 
by  those  institutions  to  the  people,  art  and 
science  are  ainningly  divorced,  and  neither  is 
held  up  in  honour.  The  result  is,  that  educa- 
tion has  debauched  the  innocence  of  the  peo- 
ple's minds.  The  ignorance  of  the  peasant  is 
transparent  compared  with  the  opaque  fog  in 
the  minds  of  the  town-dwellers,  and  this  fog 
reverts  upon  the  heart;  stultifjang  the  emo- 
tions so  that  individuality  and  spontaneity  are 
lost,  and  the  word  Education  means  a  thing 
cursed  rather  than  blessed.  Science  is  ex- 
ploited to  bring  material  comfort  and  wealth, 
never  to  spread  knowledge:  art  is  not  suffered 
to  bring  spiritual  ease  nor  to  fortify  imagina- 
tion. Knowledge  and  imagination  are  denied 
in  favour  of  the  assimilation  of  unco-ordinated 
facts  as  the  only  mental  process  suffered  to 
operate  in  social  existence.  It  is  small  won- 
der, then,  that  a  need  is  discovered  for  dis- 
cipline, but  if  it  is  made  impossible  for  the 
individual  to  discipline  himself  it  cannot  be 
achieved  by  any  external  agency.  A  habit 
of  obedience  in  public  affairs  may  be  incul- 
cated, but  against  that  the  private  person  is 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  145 

mutinous,  and  finds  stealthy  relief  in  personal 
disloyalty,  in  deception,  slackness  and  an  in- 
creasing inability  to  distinguish  between  truth 
and  falsehood,  and  finally  a  definite  prefer- 
ence for  ugliness  over  beauty,  and  with  that  of 
falsehood  over  truth.  The  streets,  the  news- 
papers, of  any  modern  town  betray  the  prev- 
alence of  this  condition  in  the  minds  of  men, 
vitiating  their  capacity  for  service  and  their 
aptness  for  the  democratic  form  of  society  in 
which  the  efforts  of  their  forefathers  have  made 
it  possible  for  them  to  live.  Without  a  drastic 
change  they  will  only  be  able  to  exist  in  it,  dis- 
loyal both  to  the  past  and  the  future. 

It  is  said  in  extenuation  that  this  is  a  scien- 
tific age,  and  that  science  is  not  concerned  with 
beauty  but  with  facts.  That  is  not  true.  With- 
out the  illumination  of  intellectual  beauty  facts 
cannot  be  discovered.  They  remain  concealed 
behind  the  mists  of  illusion.  The  beauty  served 
by  the  scientist  is  not  that  served  by  the  art- 
ist, but  it  is  akin  to  it,  and  the  spirit  of  their 
service  is  the  same.  The  discoveries  of  science 
are  used  with  no  sense  of  service,  and  there- 
fore do  not  take  with  them  the  spirit  that  pro- 
duced them:  the  shadow  is  taken,  and  the  sub- 
stance is  left,  for  in  all  human  things  the  spirit 


146         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

is  the  substance.  The  discoveries  of  science 
have  been  gulped  down  in  such  haste  that  the 
industrial  generations,  like  a  greedy  dog,  have 
had  to  vomit  them.  Bare  facts  are  an  unwhole- 
some diet,  and,  indeed,  are  only  palatable  in 
an  artful  concoction,  as  we  are  beginning  to 
find  to  our  cost,  so  that  art  from  being  an  epi- 
curean diversion  has  become  a  practical,  in- 
deed a  hard  necessity.  Religion  has  been  dis- 
carded: facts  have  been  found  an  inadequate 
substitute,  and  it  is  slowly  dawning  on  our 
numbed  intelligence  that  it  was  not  the  dis- 
coveries of  science  that  mattered,  but  the  brave 
and  adventurous  spirit:  just  as  it  was  not  the 
discoveries  of  Columbus,  Drake  and  Cook  that 
made  them  great,  but  the  spirit  in  which  they 
went  forth  on  uncharted  seas.  That  brings 
forth  fruit  an  hundredfold  in  the  power  to  use 
their  discoveries.  As  with  the  explorers  of  the 
earth,  so  with  the  explorers  of  the  forces  that 
animate  it,  and  both  need  the  support  of  the 
explorers  of  human  experience.  Without 
moral  discovery  no  noble  use  can  be  made  of 
the  powers  placed  in  our  hands  by  physical  and 
scientific  adventure,  for  of  all  work  the  bravest 
and  the  hardest  is  that  of  the  artist,  and  it  is 
from  that  work  that  the  light  of  authority 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  147 

shines  most  brightly.  Both  art  and  science 
repudiate  economic  power  as  firmly  as  they 
have  done  religion  as  a  firm  basis  for  human 
existence,  and  economic  power,  like  religion, 
has  perished  in  the  wars  of  its  own  creation. 
]Men  fight  when  they  feel  the  ground  giving 
way  beneath  their  feet.  The  sickening  dread 
that  fills  them  darkens  their  minds  and  in- 
furiates their  senses  until,  despairing  of  higher 
aims,  they  remember  primitive  satisfactions 
which  surge  through  the  memory  and  drive 
them  mad,  and  when  the  madness  leaves  them 
they  are  brought  face  to  face  with  the  fact  that 
these  satisfactions  have  lost  their  potency.  Men 
of  heart,  men  of  imagination  know  this,  and 
are  driven  to  labour  in  art  and  science  hoping 
always  to  overtake  the  despair  creeping  in  the 
veins  of  their  fellows :  always  hitherto  in  vain, 
because  the  pleasure  or  the  power  created  by 
their  efforts  has  been  kept  by  the  few  from  the 
many.  That  systematic  deprivation  should  be 
nearing  its  end.  The  artists  and  scientists  are 
the  aristocracy,  without  which  democracy  can- 
not exist,  that  is,  they  live  in  a  democracy 
which  transcends  death  and  time,  and  makes 
possible  a  democratic  society  in  an  existence 
limited  by  time  and  death.    In  a  healthy  com- 


148         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

munity  this  is  acknowledged  by  the  mainte- 
nance of  public  galleries,  libraries,  theatres, 
concert  halls,  universities ;  but  in  an  unhealthy 
society  the  communal  force  of  art  is  ignored, 
and  science,  except  in  so  far  as  it  is  profitable, 
is  flouted  lest  the  people  should  discover  in 
themselves  the  secret  of  freedom,  and  begin 
to  perceive  that  he  who  turns  his  work  into 
drudgery  for  higher  wages  loses  more  than 
he  gains:  by  self-exploitation  increases  the 
t5rranny  of  the  economic  system,  by  that  in- 
crease inflates  prices,  and  meets  in  the  end  that 
very  trouble  of  insuflicient  means  which  he  de- 
signed to  avoid. 

Self -exploitation  is  a  definite  act  which  in  a 
modern  community  every  worker  is  forced  to 
commit  under  the  menace  of  starvation.  The 
cofnmunity  of  artists  and  scientists  is  demo- 
cratic precisely  because  it  is  impossible  for  the 
workers  in  it  to  exploit  themselves.  If  they 
do  so  they  cannot  achieve  art  or  science.  The 
revolt  of  the  hand-workers  is  against  self-ex- 
ploitation. The  strength  of  their  organisations 
gives  them  breathing-space  in  which  to  realise 
that  if  they  had  not  to  commit  this  act  they 
could  not  be  exploited  by  the  classes  who  have 
betrayed  them.    Directly  they  assert  the  right 


SCIENCE  AND  ART  149 

to  contribute  their  work  freely  to  any  under- 
taking, they  will  be  able  to  break  the  vicious 
circle,  and  to  let  in  authority  as  the  ruling  prin- 
ciple which  will  quickly  reveal  to  them  the  fact 
that  the  democracy  of  art  and  science  is  the 
heart  of  humanity  from  which  its  life-blood, 
work,  flows  as  mysteriously  and  as  easily  as  the 
vivid  stream  in  the  human  body.  The  suste- 
nance taken  from  the  earth  turns  in  the  body 
to  blood,  in  society  to  work.  The  principle  is 
the  same,  and  it  should  dominate  the  great  or- 
ganisations now  being  formed  to  give  men  the 
strength  to  add  the  conquest  of  themselves  to 
their  victory  over  Nature. 


VIII 
SOCIAL  STRUCTURE 


yiii 

SOCIAL  STEUCTUEE 

Men  are  rather  like  beavers  building  dams 
which  the  flood  of  life  continually  washes 
away,  and  one  dam  is  very  like  another.  Pos- 
sibly beavers,  like  men,  believe  that  every  dam 
will  be  permanent,  for  no  other  reason  than 
that  they,  wonderful  creatures  that  they  are, 
have  built  it.  Men  also,  like  beavers,  are  am- 
phibious, but  in  different  elements.  There  may 
have  been  a  time  when  men  also  were  aware 
only  of  earth  and  water,  but  slowly  they  have 
learned  to  live  both  in  life  and  in  certain  in- 
timations of  immortality,  though  too  often  with 
a  pathetic  confusion  between  the  two.  How- 
ever, the  amphibious  capacity  is  there,  and  has 
to  be  acknowledged  in  any  philosophical  spec- 
ulation. In  the  individual  the  dual  element  is 
accepted  as  a  necessary  condition  of  being,  but 
in  combination  for  social  purposes  the  intima- 
tions of  immortality  are  generally  ignored  as 
providing    an   undue    complication.      Unfor- 

153 


164         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

tunately  for  society,  it  is  a  fact  that  only 
through  his  intimations  of  immortality  can  a 
man  use  his  senses  effectively,  and  if  he  at- 
tempts as  a  social  being  to  dispense  with  them 
he  is  as  maimed  as  if  he  had  lopped  off  his 
legs.  This  power  rightly  to  use  the  senses 
comes  from  the  memory  of  humanity,  of  which 
every  man  according  to  his  constitution  has  a 
greater  or  less  share.  It  is  commonly  called 
genius,  and  is  honoured  in  those  who,  contrary 
to  the  prevailing  habit,  have  the  courage  of  it, 
and,  as  shown  in  the  last  chapter,  have  alone 
the  capacity  for  constructing  an  enduring  so- 
ciety simply  because  they  retain  their  strongest 
social  instinct.  Nearly  every  individual  re- 
tains enough  to  keep  himself  sane,  but  not 
enough  to  preserve  the  sanity  of  society.  It  is 
selfishness,  if  you  will,  inability  to  learn  that 
the  self  is  best  served  by  being  disinterested, 
but  men  are  not  disinterested  chiefly  because 
they  find  that  no  one  is  expected  to  be  so.  The 
most  remarkable  quality  of  human  nature  is 
its  capacity  for  doing  and  being  what  is  ex- 
pected of  it. 

If,  therefore,  we  desire  to  construct  a  sane 
society,  the  first  step  in  that  direction  is  to 
raise  the  world's  expectations  of  human  na- 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  155 

ture.  Indeed,  that  is  what  has  been  gradually- 
happening,  through  history.  The  more  things 
change  the  more  they  are  the  same,  but  the 
more  they  change  the  more  we  recognise  the 
wonderful  possibilities  latent  in  them.  In- 
creasing recognition  is  progress. 

No  one  expects  miracles,  but  every  one  now 
expects  the  social  instinct  of  the  race  to  make 
hay  of  human  theories.  By  identifying  the 
social  instinct  of  the  race  with  genius  in  the  in- 
dividual, a  glimmering  of  order  begins  to  show 
through  the  chaos,  and  the  amphibious  char- 
acter of  humanity  becomes  socially  a  strength 
instead  of  a  weakness.  It  is  possible  then  to 
reconcile  human  nature  with  Nature,  and  to 
see  that  a  great  deal  of  the  social  insanity  of 
the  past  has  been  due  to  human  insensibihty 
and  lack  of  power  really  to  assume  superior- 
ity. Nature  retains  earthquakes,  thunder- 
storms, violent  seas,  poisonous  insects,  putre- 
faction and  other  agencies  with  which  to  dis- 
turb human  organisation,  which,  however,  has 
given  the  individual  power  to  emancipate  him- 
self. It  remains  to  be  seen  whether  or  no  he 
has  won  that  emancipation  at  the  cost  of  being 
enslaved  by  organisation,  but  even  if  that  has 


156         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

happened  a  few  generations  should  bring  lib- 
eration from  that  also. 

Organisation  is  all  very  well  for  physical 
needs,  but  to  satisfy  the  social  instinct  struc- 
ture is  needed.  Organisation  has  dug  out  and 
built  admirable  cellars,  but  the  edifice  itself 
has  not  yet  begun  to  appear,  and  no  one  wants 
to  go  on  indefinitely  living  in  cellars,  however 
comfortable  they  may  be.  A  man,  especially 
a  woman,  must  have  pride  in  the  dwelling- 
place,  and  the  stronger  the  social  instinct  the 
greater  the  pride. 

The  factory  system  is  the  cellar  in  which 
human  beings  of  the  twentieth  century  are 
called  on  to  live,  and  no  one  takes  any  pride 
in  it,  though  men  do  undoubtedly  take  pride 
in  the  machines,  the  huge  dynamos,  the  vast 
printing  machines,  the  marine  turbines,  the 
twelve-cylinder  aero-engines,  with  which  they 
work,  but  they  desire  also  an  equal  pride  in 
their  own  lives.  Why  should  more  and  more 
energy  go  into  machines  and  less  and  less  into 
the  lives  of  men  and  women?  Why  should  the 
availa])le  amount  of  happiness  so  alarmingly 
shrink,  and  the  dwindling  thoughts  of  men 
move  in  an  increasing  chaos?  It  is  small  won- 
der that  the  social  instinct  has  taken  alarm  and 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  IST 

begins  to  insist  that  some  noble  edifice  shall  be 
raised  on  so  formidable  a  ground  plan. 

The  Russians,  who  enjoyed  the  doubtful 
privilege  of  living  in  a  dilapidated  mediseval 
structure,  have  razed  it  to  the  ground,  and 
start  level  with  the  rest  of  us.  There  are  only 
two  Emperors  left  in  the  world,  the  Emperor 
of  India  and  the  Emperor  of  Japan.  The 
workers  of  the  world  have  their  grand  oppor- 
tunity to  unite,  but  they  do  not,  because, 
though  the  will  is  there,  they  have  no  plan,  no 
scheme,  not  even  a  rough  draft  committing 
their  dream  to  paper.  Their  dream,  like  the 
society  in  which  they  have  suffered  so  long,  is 
formless,  and  they  know  not  what  to  build. 
They  are  hand-workers  and  they  have  to  build 
a  house  not  made  with  hands.  Fortunately, 
they  have  the  habit  of  work,  and  are  humble 
enough  to  be  willing  to  learn  as  they  go  along, 
letting  their  past  sufferings  be  the  instructors 
of  their  future  hopes.  Their  care,  as  always, 
will  be  for  their  children,  and  in  building  for 
them  they  should  create  the  model  that  future 
generations  must  follow. 

Imagine  a  school  that  should  satisfy  the  love 
of  a  mother  for  her  child,  instead  of  a  place 
to  which  a  child  is  torn  to  satisfy  a  grudgingly 


168        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

made  law.  The  difference  is  one  of  spirit,  but 
the  question  here  is  all  of  such  difference,  be- 
tween the  new  and  the  old.  .  .  .  Such  a  school 
in  any  village,  any  parish,  should  have  about 
it  the  communal  pride  that  has  fallen  away 
from  the  Church.  It  would  be  a  place  of  sim- 
plicity, health  and  beauty,  with  playgrounds, 
gymnasium,  laboratory,  workshop,  a  clinic,  a 
garden  with  allotments  and  a  play-room,  with 
a  properly  equipped  stage  for  the  regular  pro- 
duction and  performance  of  plays,  so  that  the 
children  should  learn  the  right  use  of  their 
hands,  brains  and  imaginations ;  and  the  teach- 
ers should  be  given  a  status  equivalent  to  the 
authority  vested  in  their  sacred  calling.  No 
smaller  word  will  serve :  their  calling  is  sacred, 
because  it  gives  its  practitioner  access  to  the 
human  mind  at  its  most  delicate  and  suscep- 
tible, when  if  it  be  not  approached  tenderly 
and  with  reverence  it  will  surely  sustain  in- 
jury. The  reverence  of  the  teacher  for  his  call- 
ing should  inspire  respect  for  his  craft  and  all 
that  it  implies  of  good  or  ill  for  humanity. 

In  such  a  school  should  be  the  beginnings 
of  democracy,  the  children  being  responsible 
for  its  organisation,  with  reference,  if  need  be, 
to  their  parents,  whose  work,  after  all,  pays 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  159 

for  it.  With  such  a  training  in  practical  de- 
mocracy they  could  as  they  grew  proceed  to  the 
factory  with  some  equipment  for  its  applica- 
tion there,  and  from  that  their  capacity  could 
work  in  their  union,  their  parish,  or  munici- 
pality, and  so  up  through  the  larger  units  of 
social  organisation.  They  would  very  quickly 
learn  to  apply  democracy  to  the  home  where 
it  is  most  needed,  and  in  this  way  the  new 
spirit  would  find  its  way  through  the  whole 
of  human  society.  Without  the  release  of 
that  spirit,  nothing  can  be  done  and  nothing 
will  be  achieved,  but  a  dreary  levelling  out 
in  which  the  duality  of  human  nature  will 
be  denied  more  bluntly  than  ever.  Equality 
and  fraternity  are  fine  ideals  for  the  one  ele- 
ment of  human  nature,  but  the  other,  brooding 
on  its  immortality,  insists  upon  the  aristocratic 
privilege  of  privacy,  or,  in  one  word.  Liberty. 
It  is  the  lack  of  privacy  that  makes  poverty 
so  devastating  a  thing,  more  deadening  and 
stultifying  even  than  the  fear  of  actual  want. 
A  man  becomes  a  healthy  social  being  by  dint 
of  the  continual  gymnastic  of  sacrifice,  and  if 
he  has  nothing  to  sacrifice  he  cannot  enjoy  or 
profit  by  the  exercise.  Rob  a  man  of  his  pri- 
vacy and  you  strip  him  of  his  power  to  develop 


160        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

the  social  instinct  that  is  native  to  him.  He 
becomes,  whatever  his  prosperity,  a  burden  to 
himself  and,  whatever  his  wealth,  a  drudge 
who  cannot  become  a  worker.  Wliich  a  man  is 
to  be,  drudge  or  worker,  is  settled  very  early 
in  life;  and  it  is  very  largely  to  escape  the  ma- 
terial penalties  of  drudgery  that  social  cun- 
ning has  been  developed  to  so  fine  a  pitch,  and 
that  has  meant  the  condemnation  to  drudgery 
of  numbers  that  increase  alarmingly  from  gen- 
eration to  generation,  and  with  that  a  weaken- 
ing of  the  impulse  to  give  form  and  structure 
to  society  and  a  barricading  of  the  indolence 
which  takes  and  gives  nothing,  and  corrupts 
the  only  structure  that  we  have.  Finance. 

There  is  no  valid  objection  to  the  use  of 
money  as  a  symbol  for  work,  except  that  it  is 
not  regarded  or  respected  as  a  sjTnbol,  but  is 
treated  as  a  commodity  like  any  other  of  which 
any  man  is  entitled  to  as  much  as  he  can  lay 
hands  on  without  infringing  the  law.  But 
money  is  different  from  other  commodities  in 
that  it  exists  by  social  agreement  as  a  means 
of  maintaining  the  currency  of  work — in  which 
commodities  are  included  as  the  result  of  work 
and  therefore  part  and  parcel  of  it.  Breach 
of  that  agreement  is  a  breach  of  honour,  and 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  161 

any  shufHing  of  money  which  does  not  trans- 
fer work  from  individual  to  individual,  or  from 
group  to  group,  is  an  injury  to  society  of  the 
same  kind  as  that  which  accrues  from  the 
hoarding  of  money  for  its  own  sake.  Both 
these  offences  will  always  exist,  but  the  time 
is  passing  when  they  could  be  regarded  as 
virtues,  for  the  time  has  arrived  when  the 
financial  structure  of  society  must  be  drastic- 
ally altered,  so  that  all  accumulations  of  work 
or  money  can  be  democratically  used  and  dem- 
ocratically controlled. 

Words  by  reiteration  lose  their  meaning, 
but  very  often  differences  of  meaning  can  be 
composed  after  the  passage  of  time.  For 
three  generations  now  the  words  Capital  and 
Labour  have  been  used  in  such  sharp  opposi- 
tion to  each  other  that  they  are  generally  ac- 
cepted as  being  irreconcilable,  and  in  ordinary 
intercourse  words  replace  the  facts  they  should 
mean  in  the  minds  of  speaker  and  hearer. 
Capital  is  Labour,  or  work,  kept  in  storage. 
It  has  been  cruelly  abused  by  the  custom  of 
treating  labour  as  a  purchasable  commodity. 
The  labourer  contracts  to  give  his  work  in  ex- 
change for  its  equivalent  in  money,  which  rep- 
resents work  in  storage.     The  bargain  should 


162        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

be  between  equal  men  on  equal  terms,  but  it 
is  hard  for  the  labourer  to  forget  that  his  fore- 
fathers were  serfs,  and  for  the  capitalist  to 
shake  off  the  idea  that  the  men  in  whose  place 
he  stands  were  noble  lords,  and  by  divine  right 
owners  of  men  as  they  were  owners  of  cattle. 
But  for  the  refusal  of  the  capitalist  to  do  his 
share  of  the  fundamental  brain-work  of  the 
world  the  labourer  might  even  now  agree  not 
to  remember  that  he  is  a  free  man,  at  any  rate 
in  theory.  But  the  betrayal  remains,  and  with 
it  the  sore  suspicion  that  it  has  created.  More 
than  material  discontent  is  at  work,  and  the 
hand-worker  seeks  in  the  brain-worker  not  a 
master,  but  a  colleague.  There  the  artist, 
whose  master  is  the  human  spirit,  joins  hands 
with  him;  the  two  workers,  who  have  always 
sought  each  other,  come  together  to  their  mu- 
tual relief,  and  together  they  can  proceed  on 
their  healthy  task  of  simplification.  The  ar- 
tist's whole  being  cries:  Simplify,  simplify, 
because  without  simplicity  there  is  no  art :  the 
artisan  from  his  experience  knows  shrewdly 
that  without  simplicity  there  is  no  life.  If  emo- 
tions are  comphcated  it  means  that  they  have 
come  to  the  surface  before  they  are  ripe.  If 
the  problems  of  every  day  become  hopelessly 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  163 

complex  it  means  that  some  one  somewhere 
has  been  in  a  hurry.  Every  worker  knows  that 
if  he  gets  too  far  away  from  his  work  he  loses 
his  touchstone,  and  makes  blunders  impossible 
in  his  normal  existence;  and  every  worker 
knows  that  if  by  ill-luck  he  finds  ^himself 
among  people  to  whom  work  is  as  foreign  as 
the  poles,  he  suffers  from  such  a  twisting  and 
torturing  of  life  into  uncognisable  shapes  as 
out  of  Bedlam  he  could  never  have  imagined 
— a  noise,  a  nervous  tremor,  a  shattering  of 
social  intercourse  into  fragments  and  a  mad- 
dening syncopation  of  the  rhythm  of  life.  In 
a  state  of  society  in  which  it  is  a  legitimate 
ambition  to  avoid  work,  that  oppression  hangs 
everywhere  like  a  damp  mist,  making  a  rust 
upon  the  machinery  of  society  and  an  ague  in 
the  bones  of  the  men  who  live  in  it,  and  the 
energy  to  remove  these  impediments  can  only 
come  from  the  release  of  the  inward  light  of 
the  soul.  Those  who  are  content  to  live  in  a 
dead  and  decaying  society  must  themselves  be 
dead  and  decaying,  morally  lost;  and  people 
in  that  condition  will  only  respond  to  economic 
pressure,  which  by  a  just  dispensation  always 
follows  on  the  disasters  they  induce  by  their 
indifference.     There  is  a  limit  to  the  extent 


164        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

to  which  one  generation  can  live  on  the  efforts 
of  its  predecessors  and  on  mortgaging  those  of 
its  successors.  An  actuary  might  estimate  it, 
but  long  before  it  is  reached  the  conscience  of 
honest  men  begins  to  protest,  and  if  their  pro- 
tests are  not  heeded  the  result  is,  as  a  rule, 
either  war  or  revolution,  or  both. 

It  is  doubtful  whether  war  or  revolution  can 
be  avoided,  but  it  should  be  possible  to  build 
a  social  structure  which  is  proof  against  them. 
First,  the  foundation  must  be  solid.  The  foun- 
dation is  the  rough  work  of  the  world,  and 
that  can  only  be  made  solid  if  it  is  done  in  hon- 
ourable conditions:  that  is,  if  it  is  organised 
upon  an  equitable  contract  between  the  brain- 
workers  and  the  hand-workers,  with  a  proper- 
ly appointed  authority  to  act  as  trustee  be- 
tween the  two.  The  Japanese  build  houses 
which  are  proof  against  earthquake  by  trans- 
mitting the  shock  of  the  disturbance  to  a  pen- 
dulum. In  the  social  structure  the  pendulum 
is  public  Opinion,  which,  when  the  authority 
of  the  democracy  of  the  artists  and  scientists 
is  established — as  it  can  be  by  education — 
should  swing  so  freely  and  with  such  momen- 
tum as  to  defy  manipulation.  The  point  is 
that  public  opinion,  to  be  of  service  instead  of 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  165 

disservice,  must  depend  upon  such  honesty  as 
human  nature  has  achieved.  To  be  honest,  as 
this  world  goes,  is  to  be  one  man  picked  out  of 
ten  thousand.  Rascality  cannot  be  obliterat- 
ed, but  it  can  be  curbed ;  no  longer  by  the 
threat  of  punishment  in  Hell,  but  by  a  swifter 
painful  reaction  than  is  possible  in  the  present 
scheme  of  things,  under  which  men  live  in  such 
enormous  units  that  the  consequences  of  their 
doings  take  too  long  to  reach  them,  and  by  the 
time  the  effect  of  one  rascality  reaches  the 
doer,  another  can  be  accomplished  as  a  defence 
against  it.  The  consequence  is  that  the  effects 
of  rascality  accumulate  and  break  into  disaster 
involving  the  innocent  and  the  guilty  alike,  and 
the  unsuspecting  innocent  more  deeply.  That 
is  why  contemplation  of  the  present  order  of 
society  inspires  such  disgust.  It  may  feed  and 
clothe  the  people  more  efficiently  than  any 
previous  system  owing  to  its  vastly  improved 
transport,  but  it  huddles  them  together,  de- 
prives them  of  privacy,  and,  therefore,  of  lib- 
erty, and  passes  on  to  the  most  helpless  the 
consequences  of  all  ill-doing. 

We  are  not  looking  for  a  Utopia  in  which 
all  men  shall  enjoy  a  perfect  happiness.  It 
is  not  happiness  that  makes  a  society  healthy 


166        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

so  much  as  the  striving  for  it;  and  the  com- 
plaint here  brought  against  a  world  of  com- 
munities which  deny  the  existence  of  a  single 
human  community  is  that  it  cramps  stming. 
and  without  that  the  work  of  the  world  suflPers. 
When  that  happens  rascality  thrives,  which  is 
what  Dr.  Johnson  meant  when  he  said  that 
patriotism  is  the  last  resort  of  scoundrels. 
There  are,  however,  honest  patriots  to  whom 
the  idea  of  a  single  community  is  repellent,  for 
it  corresponds  in  their  minds  to  a  dream  of  an 
anonymous  and  amorphous  mass  of  human  be- 
ings without  colour  or  character  in  their  lives. 
But  a  man  loses  character  in  proportion  as  he 
transfers  his  pride  in  being  a  man  to  any  lesser 
element  of  his  being.  When  men  are  men 
first,  and  Englishmen,  Frenchmen,  Germans 
afterwards,  there  can  be  some  hope  of  their 
acknowledging  the  most  characteristic  product 
of  their  nationality,  its  art.  Men  cannot  de- 
tach themselves  from  their  own  racial  experi- 
ence, but  they  can,  with  a  very  httle  knowl- 
edge, learn  to  respect  that  of  other  men,  and 
with  the  community  of  art  before  them,  they 
can  begin  to  admit  its  truth  into  their  daily 
activities.  With  that  the  growth  of  the  so- 
cial structure  can  be  seen,  and  some  element 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  167 

of  design  can  be  introduced  into  it,  for  design 
is  born  out  of  the  consciousness  of  the  human 
mind  of  the  rhythm  and  impulse  of  humanity, 
most  easily  felt  in  love,  most  purely  appre- 
hended through  work. 

The  attempt  to  build  the  social  structure 
after  the  designs  laid  down  by  theology  from 
the  roof  downwards  has  failed.  A  roof  is  well 
for  the  body,  but  the  soul  needs  no  other  than 
the  sky.  The  social  structure,  then,  must  be 
builded  to  the  heavens,  as  science  is  built,  and 
poetry  and  the  work  of  all  the  arts.  Then 
what  is  made  with  hands — after  all,  so  small 
a  part  of  life — will  have  for  model  what  is 
created  and  continually  recreated,  and  the  so- 
cial being  of  a  man  will  be  able  to  move  freely 
in  humanity,  going  from  strength  to  strength 
as  it  finds  its  way  from  the  home  to  the  school, 
from  the  school  to  the  factory,  from  the  fac- 
tory to  the  various  councils  of  men,  sharing  in 
communal  pleasures  and  arts,  and  learning 
from  them  the  skill  to  guard  and  preserve  its 
private  joys.  Confronted  with  union  for  good 
the  powers  of  evil  would  then  be  dissipated  and 
distracted,  for  separation  is  evil's  opportunity, 
unity  its  despair.  The  kingdom  of  God  that 
is  within  men  would  then  find  this  earth  a  place 


168       THE  ANATO]VIY  OF  SOCIETY 

in  which  it  could  give  forth  its  authority,  and 
men  would  be  able  to  communicate  with  each 
other  fully :  no  longer  in  the  bastard  tongue  of 
the  market  place,  but  with  the  fully  uttered 
thought  that  needs  sanction  before  it  can  ap- 
pear upon  the  lips  or  in  the  eyes  to  illuminate 
the  countenance.  Who  that  has  ever  loved,  or 
has  found  himself  saluted  by  book,  song,  paint- 
ing, or  sculpture,  or  almost  intolerably  moved 
by  dramatic  speech,  does  not  know  the  joy  of 
seeing  faces  become  countenances?  There  is 
no  greater  source  of  misery  than  seeing  day 
by  day  faces  that  cannot  kindle,  faces  that 
neither  give  nor  reflect  any  light  and  are  but 
masks  to  cover  suffering.  So  prevalent  is  this 
misery  that  it  would  seem  that  society  also  is 
but  a  mask  to  cover  the  wretchedness  of  hu- 
manity, a  screen  set  up  between  the  human 
conscience  and  the  doings  of  men ;  and  it  is  to 
maintain  this  that  the  work  of  the  world  is 
perverted.  Yet  men  work  to  defend  them- 
selves against  the  ills  of  life.  Why,  then,  do 
they  so  aggravate  them? 

The  answer  to  that  question  provides  some 
illumination. 

The  world  on  which  we  live  is  round,  and 
every  community  in  it  is  a  segment  of  a  circle. 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  169 

The  work  of  every  community  moves  towards 
the  centre,  but,  with  the  exception  of  the  work 
of  the  artists,  is  never  suffered  to  pass  through 
the  centre  into  the  other  segments.  Instead, 
it  is  carried  laboriously  round  the  circumfer- 
ence, because  work  is  confused  with  the  com- 
modities produced  by  it.  But  the  most  impor- 
tant result  of  work  is  credit,  and  that  is  as 
easily  transferable  as  any  other  mental  or  spir- 
itual thing.  Credit  is  held  up  at  the  centre  of 
the  circle,  with  the  result  that  the  vast  major- 
ity of  human  beings  in  every  segment,  every 
community,  are  deprived  of  credit  and  the  re- 
lease it  should  give  from  anxiety.  No  one 
segment  can  exist  without  the  other,  no  com- 
munity can  live  apart  from  the  whole,  and  yet 
each  uses  its  credit  against  the  other  and  de- 
prives its  members  of  the  credit  of  the  whole. 
The  divorce  of  man  from  humanity  is  repeated 
in  the  financial  system  of  the  world.  Each 
community  regards  its  credit  as  something  dis- 
tinct from  the  credit  created  by  the  individuals 
composing  it;  that  is  to  say,  the  community, 
which  should  be  the  conduit  of  credit  from  man 
to  humanity  and  from  humanity  to  man, 
usurps. and  abuses  it,  and  until  that  is  reme- 
died there  cannot  be  the  liberty  or  the  leisure 


170        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

or  the  enthusiasm  necessary  for  social  architec- 
ture, because  the  great  mass  of  men  have  to 
work  for  an  inadequate  return  and  are  cheated 
of  their  just  share  in  the  life  of  the  community 
which  can  only  be  imparted  to  them  first  of 
all  in  credit.  That  granted,  the  rest  follows. 
For  a  man  to  be  able  to  contribute  more  than 
his  bare  labour  to  the  community  he  must  be 
given  his  due  share  of  credit,  and  no  longer 
asked  to  consent  in  its  being  wasted  in  the  lux- 
ury of  bellicose  patriotism  and  the  vain  at- 
tempt to  make  commercial  competition  do  the 
work  of  co-operation.  All  that  has  been  ag- 
gravated by  the  rapid  improvement  of  trans- 
port, but  the  mania  for  speed  that  blinds  the 
Europeans  of  this  century  is  a  joke  to  those 
who  know  the  speed  of  the  spirit  and  the  in- 
comparable flight  of  the  imagination.  The 
speeding-up  of  production  so  dear  to  Ameri- 
cans can  only  aggravate  the  present  conges- 
tion of  credit,  unless  means  are  taken  to  see 
to  it  that  the  credit  accorded  to  a  nation  bene- 
fits the  individuals  in  it;  and  this  can  only  be 
done  by  the  removal  of  a  class  whose  function 
is  the  manipulation  of  credit,  which  they  do  ir- 
responsibly and  the  more  ineffectively  as  the 
enormous  accumulations  of  credit  in  a  great 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  171 

modern  community  are  apt  to  intoxicate  the 
minds  of  those  who  are  in  a  position  uncon- 
trolled to  dispose  of  them.  Every  man  for  a 
week's  work  should  be  in  a  position  to  guar- 
antee his  livelihood  for  the  following  week,  and 
with  every  week's  work  to  increase  his  guaran- 
tee, the  risk  of  his  dying  being  borne  by  the 
community  as  part  of  his  credit,  the  communi- 
ty in  the  first  place  having  accepted  the  risk 
of  his  being  born.  To  arrange  this  it  must  be- 
come as  impossible  for  a  man  to  set  his  nation 
above  humanity  as  for  him  to  set  his  family 
above  his  nation,  but  with  the  release  of  credit 
this  would  come  about  in  the  nature  of  things, 
for  the  incentive  to  set  a  smaller  loyalty  above 
the  greater  would  disappear.  Equality  of 
rights  would  then  only  be  tempered  by  a  grad- 
ing of  duties,  and  that  would  automatically  ad- 
just itself,  for  the  higher  a  duty  and  the  more 
noble  its  performance  the  less  does  a  man  seek 
to  be  rewarded  for  it. 

Credit  is  already  centralised,  but  it  is  dis- 
posed of  at  the  caprice  of  men  whose  sole  idea 
of  serving  humanity  is  to  show  a  profit,  even 
at  the  cost  of  human  suffering.  EstabHsh  con- 
trol of  credit  and  the  necessity  for  maintaining 
it  by  nefarious  means  disappears.    The  science 


172        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

of  accountancy  can  replace  the  blundering 
methods  of  Finance,  which  at  present  only  al- 
low accountancy  to  disclose  a  profit,  and  not 
to  provide  a  means  by  which  credit  can  be 
transferred  from  the  community  to  the  work- 
ing individual. 

When  the  individual  has  been  given  his  cred- 
it— the  most  direct  way  of  making  hiiu  feel 
his  oneness  with  humanity — he  must  be  edu- 
cated to  know  how  to  use  it,  both  as  producer 
and  as  consumer,  and  as  a  member  of  the  vari- 
ous groups  to  which  he  is  attached,  the  family, 
the  industrial  group,  the  municipality,  the  na- 
tion, the  community,  each  group  being  in  the 
position  of  trustee  to  its  subordinate,  taking 
work  from  it  and  giving  it  credit  in  return. 
This  social  structure  is  already  beginning  to 
appear.  The  spirit  with  which  it  shall  be  ani- 
mated has  been  preserved  against  all  usurping 
authorities  by  the  great  democracy  of  the  art- 
ists and  scientists,  between  whom  and  suffer- 
ing humanity  remains  only  the  bankrupt  sys- 
tem of  finance  which  is  the  fatal  legacy  of 
feudalism,  with  its  pernicious  system  of  priv- 
ileges (a  rudimentary  form  of  credit)  and 
monopolies.  The  disappearance  of  royal  dy- 
nasties  has   left   in  power  innumerable  dy- 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  173 

nasties,  respectable  and  propertied  families 
who  maintain  their  ascendancy  exactly  as  roy- 
al personages  used  to  do  by  supporting  armed 
forces  and  laws  which  enslave  the  workers  to 
their  property.  To  protect  themselves  against 
the  organisation  of  the  workers  they  have  been 
driven  into  international  combination,  in  spite 
of  their  fervent  protests  of  nationalism ;  and  in 
this  way  have  created  the  great  pool  of  the 
world's  credit  that  has  at  last  brought  its  heal- 
thy circulation  within  the  bounds  of  possibil- 
ity. As  the  transport  of  commodities  is  facil- 
itated the  transference  of  credit  must  be  made 
even  more  expeditious,  and  the  necessary  re- 
adjustment is  impeded  by  the  waste  of  credit 
upon  national  defences  which  for  a  long  time 
now  have  in  fact  been  merely  an  excuse  by 
which  the  propertied  djmasties  maintained 
their  control  of  credit.  They  were  forced  to 
frighten  the  ignorant  masses  into  acquiescence, 
but  the  use  of  fear  as  an  instrument  of  gov- 
ernment is  a  boomerang,  because  it  rouses  the 
animal  impulses  in  great  herds  of  men,  and 
these,  once  roused,  will  be  satisfied.  Those 
who  cannot  govern  except  through  fear  prove 
their  unfitness  for  it. 

Men  as  individuals  have  learned  that  it  does 


174        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

not  pay  to  be  governed  by  their  appetites. 
Men  in  society  have  yet  to  leam  that  the  same 
laws  apply  to  humanity  as  a  whole,  and  that 
humanity,  like  themselves,  must  be  governed 
by  the  mind,  as,  indeed,  unconsciously  it  is. 
The  time  is  coming  when  they  may  be  con- 
scious. The  appetites  of  men  are  unruly. 
Thwarted  in  the  lives  of  individual  men,  they 
break  loose  in  society,  provoking  sporadic  out- 
bursts of  revolt  against  the  government  of  the 
mind.  The  tyrants  and  conquerors  of  the 
world  have  ruined  themselves  by  leading  that 
revolt:  the  Caesars,  the  Cromwells,  the  Napo- 
leons ;  but  they  and  their  works  are  broken  on 
the  will  of  humanity,  which  does  not  operate 
through  violence  and  sudden  convulsions,  but 
by  the  slow,  inexorable  force  of  vision  seeking 
expression  in  form.  The  true  leaders  of  men 
are  the  visionaries,  but  they  lead  at  a  distance 
of  generations.  The  visible  and  immediate 
leaders  are,  or  should  be,  those  who  huve  been 
kindled  by  the  vision  into  honesty,  so  that  it 
is  their  concern  to  preserve  it  from  the  rebel- 
lious appetites  of  men,  and  they  would  no 
more  exploit  the  appetite  for  wealth  than  they 
would  that  for  food  or  women  or  indecency. 
With  some,  even  a  shght  element  of  form  in- 


SOCIAL  STRUCTURE  175 

troduced  into  society,  men  would  as  naturally 
follow  their  true  leaders  as  they  have  learned 
to  obey  the  law,  and  as  social  beings  they  would 
as  gladly  accept  the  mind's  ordering  of  the  ap- 
petites as  they  do  in  their  individual  lives.  It 
is  certain  that  civilised  men  cannot  much  long- 
er accept  the  barbaric  dictates  of  the  commu- 
nity, or  respond  to  the  base  appeals  made  to 
their  appetites  by  the  dynasties  for  whom  their 
profoundest  needs  are  sacrificed.  If  men  are 
granted  their  due  of  credit  and  liberty  they 
can  be  trusted  to  abide  by  the  social  contract. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  they  are  forced  into  a 
sullen  acquiescence  it  will  not  be  long  before 
their  appetites,  always  in  revolt  against  the 
mind,  will  leap  to  the  revolt  in  their  souls,  take 
fire  from  it  and  drive  them  out  upon  errands 
of  destruction. 

The  horror  of  the  war  of  1914-18  is  the 
measure  of  the  social  injustice  from  which  it 
sprang.  The  fact  that  no  great  tyrant  or  con- 
queror has  come  out  of  it  is  the  measure  of  the 
extent  to  which  the  social  conscience  and  the 
feeling  for  social  structure  have  been  released 
by  it.  The  appetites  seek  the  leadership  of  an 
ambitious  man:  the  mind  pursues  rather  the 
guidance  of  the  spirit.    Out  of  the  tragedy  has 


176        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

come  no  great  human  figure,  but  in  the  hum- 
blest heart  the  spirit  is  felt  at  work;  the  desire 
to  make  of  this  earth  not  a  brawling  place  of 
the  passions,  but  a  most  holy  abiding  place 
where  those  passions  can  be  turned  to  noble 
uses  and  to  the  creation  of  a  life  where  men 
and  women  can  live  together,  not  in  that  peace 
which  is  a  mere  folding  of  the  hands,  but  in 
the  peace  which  is  a  striving  after  more  and 
more  dehght,  that  no  moment  of  joy  or  suf- 
fering, of  suffering  through  joy,  and  of  joy 
through  suffering,  may  escape  unlived.  That 
can  only  be  if  men  leave  their  primitive  and 
beaver-hke  building  of  dams,  and  will,  on  the 
high  ground  conquered  for  them  by  the  vision- 
aries, build  and  rebuild,  even  as  Nature  builds 
her  seasons,  a  house  whose  flooring  is  the  hu- 
man heart  and  whose  roof  is  the  firmament, 
whence  light  comes  to  call  into  men's  eyes  the 
tender  and  more  penetrating  light  of  the  soul. 
For  the  house  is  not  to  be  built  with  hands,  and 
only  by  that  light  can  the  materials  for  it  be 
chosen. 


IX 

EAST  AND  WEST 


IX 

EAST  AND  WEST 

The  mystics  of  the  East  sink  into  their  con- 
templation the  more  directly  to  commune  with 
the  will  of  humanity.  Escaping  the  brawling 
noise  of  every  day  they  can  through  the  si- 
lence hear  the  murmuring  of  truth,  and  in  si- 
lence release  it  to  pass  into  the  turbulence  of 
men  and  women  to  sweeten  it  and  to  keep 
them  from  perishing.  And  the  East  accepts 
that  these  are  holy  men  and  prizes  their  func- 
tion in  society,  even  relies  on  it  too  much,  and 
acquiesces  in  the  scourges  of  life — poverty,  dis- 
ease, famine — against  which  the  West  these 
hundreds  of  years  has  been  in  rfevolt.  Because 
the  mystic  cannot  stay  these  scourges  he  is 
in  the  West  ignored  because  his  function  is  not 
understood,  and  in  the  West  men  imagine  that 
it  is  better  to  perish  of  untruth  than  of  plague. 
In  the  struggle  against  physical  afflictions  spir- 
itual distempers  are  ignored,  though  it  is  worse 
for  herds  of  men  to  perish  in  mid-hfe  than  to 
be  swept  away  by  some  raging  pestilence,  be- 

179 


180        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

cause  the  harm  done  to  humanity  by  the  mor- 
ally dead  is  infinitely  worse  than  that  which  is 
done  by  the  actively  evil,  for  this  is  a  flame 
that  bums  itself  out  while  that  is  a  smoulder- 
ing and  creeping  fire.  In  all  its  plagues,  fam- 
ines, poverty  and  disease  the  East  is  far  in  ad- 
vance of  the  West  in  moral  understanding, 
and  can  afford  to  smile  at  the  Occidentals  with 
their  irrigation,  sanitation,  railways,  canals, 
aeroplanes  and  steamships.  These  the  East 
can  accept  and  assimilate,  without  disturbing 
its  traditions,  while  waiting  for  the  West  to 
understand  the  meaning  of  silence  and  the  im- 
portance of  the  distinction  between  time  and 
eternity.  The  difference  arises  from  taking 
up  the  stick  at  different  ends.  The  East  ap- 
proaches the  mystery  of  being  from  what  we, 
following  Wordsworth,  have  called  intima- 
tions of  inmiortality,  while  the  West  attacks 
rather  than  approaches  it  froth  the  phenomena 
of  existence  which  it  elects  to  call  life. 

The  admission  of  the  single  community  of 
humanity  brings  East  and  West  together 
without  a  clash.  There  may  be  war  between 
the  yellow  races  and  the  white,  but  it  will  as- 
suredly not  be  a  war  over  their  differences  but 
a  matter  of  commercial  advantage ;  and  it  can 


EAST  AND  WEST  181 

only  come  through  the  indecent  haste  of  the 
Occidentals,  or  it  may  only  come  through  the 
final  refusal  of  the  propertied  dynasties  of  the 
West — enthroned  in  Anglo-Saxon  suburbs — 
to  surrender  their  monopoly  of  credit.  All 
that  remains  to  be  seen,  but  the  evolution  of 
society  has  gone  so  far  that  war  has  lost  any 
significance  it  ever  had,  and  is  henceforth  to 
be  classed  with  the  traffic  in  prostitutes,  opium, 
alcohol  and  pornographic  literature  and  photo- 
graphs as  an  evil  to  be  stamped  out.  If  the 
West  is  to  instruct  the  East  in  physical  well- 
being,  the  East  has  to  tutor  the  West  in  spir- 
itual and  in  the  art  of  practising  rehgion,  and 
of  the  two  the  West  has  the  easier  task.  A  na- 
tion in  these  days  can  become  industrialised  in 
a  generation,  but,  as  the  English  have  so  pain- 
fully shown,  it  is  by  far  not  enough  to  be  in- 
dustrialised. Much  that  was  precious  in  the 
older  and  slowly  grown  civilisations  has  to  be 
reconstituted.  Traditions  seem  to  disappear 
in  the  fever  of  increased  production — and  with 
that  of  multiplied  population — but  they  re^ 
main  untouched  and  bide  their  time.  The 
English  tradition  that  has  seemed  to  be  sus- 
pended after  the  Napoleonic  wars  found  its 
isolated  souls,  a  Gissing,  a  Mark  Rutherford, 


182        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

in  which,  however  faintly,  to  express  itself. 
The  true  tradition  of  a  race  is  not  in  those 
achievements  recorded  by  history,  but  in  its 
utterance  of  truth.  That  is  its  real  contribu- 
tion to  civilisation,  and  all  else  follows  directly^ 
or  indirectly  in  its  train.  The  English  tradi- 
tion is  for  quietude  and  order  against  which 
the  robust  appetites  of  the  English  have  al- 
ways been  in  revolt,  just  as  the  ferocious  appe- 
tites of  the  French  have  always  been  in  revolt 
against  their  logical  genius.  There  are  three 
logics :  that  of  the  spirit,  that  of  the  mind,  and 
that  of  the  heart — the  first  is  Eastern,  the  sec- 
ond French,  the  third  Enghsh.  The  Russians, 
in  whom  the  great  drama  of  East  and  West  is 
being  played,  are  attempting  to  reconcile  all 
three.  That  is  the  significance  and  the  impor- 
tance to  humanity  of  the  Russian  Revolution. 
Without  logic  there  can  be  no  social  structure. 
The  French  Revolution  pursued  the  logic  of 
the  mind:  that  is  not  enough.  The  English 
Revolution  pursued  the  logic  of  the  heart :  that 
is  not  enough.  Nor,  by  itself,  is  the  logic  of 
the  spirit  enough.  Religion  has  symbolised 
these  three  in  the  Trinity,  and  that  is  the  sym- 
bol to  which  the  Russian  Revolution  is  at- 
tempting to  restore  vahdity,  though  its  force 


EAST  AND  WEST  188 

Bas  been  diverted  to  the  establishment  of  com- 
munist economic  theories  in  order  to  check- 
mate the  operations  of  European  and  Ameri- 
can capitalism.  Russia,  half -Asiatic,  is  bound 
to  defend  itself  against  the  vices  of  civilisation, 
even  at  the  cost  of  anarchy  and  famine.  It  is 
a  case  in  which  the  beggar  cannot  without  dis- 
honour accept  aid  from  the  rich  man.  Russia, 
indeed,  stands  for  the  revolt  of  humanity 
against  the  rich,  who  have  forced  that  rebellion 
by  their  refusal  to  admit  that  they  hold  their 
riches  upon  trust.  Centuries  ago  the  Chris- 
tian Religion  was  spht  on  this  very  point,  and 
the  Byzantine  Church  retained  more  of  the 
mystic  quality  of  the  teaching  of  Jesus  than 
did  the  Roman. 

Mysticism  implies  an  intensification  of  life, 
not  an  escape  from  it.  The  East  has  under- 
stood this,  while  the  West,  crude  enough  to  be 
in  a  hurry  even  in  its  hope  of  Heaven,  has  de- 
graded religion  to  the  level  of  a  syrup  for  wea- 
riness of  the  soul,  with  the  result  that  the  logic 
of  the  mind  has  been  fanatically  pursued  in 
Europe  to  end  in  a  social  theory  by  which  hu- 
man nature  is  repelled.  This  mood  of  repul- 
sion, dragging  through  generations,  has  given 
the  materially  minded  the  opportunity  which 


184        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

they  have  not  been  slow  to  use,  and  they  have 
developed  and  organised  the  commercial  side 
of  international  intercourse,  but  no  other,  and 
life  which  should  have  been  intensified  has  been 
relaxed.  With  greater  opportunities  for  life 
than  their  predecessors,  men  in  the  modern 
world  live  less,  and  are  more  fatally  unable  to 
rise  to  the  height  of  a  great  occasion.  Great 
communities  crumble  into  desuetude  out  of 
sheer  physical  and  mental  inanition.  They 
have  lost  the  thread  of  the  logic  of  the  spirit 
largely  because  under  modem  organisation 
men  and  women  live  too  much  in  public.  The 
monotony  of  daily  and  excessive  toil  has  re- 
duced them  to  a  dull  uniformity  of  shallow 
thoughts  and  superficial  emotions.  A  sophis- 
ticated life  has  been  established  in  the  West 
without  achieving  the  simplicity  which  is  the 
object  of  sophistication.  The  problem  is,  as 
always,  how  to  preserve  in  society  the  natural 
and  beautiful  simplicity  of  Man,  which,  if  it  be 
assailed,  he  is  ferocious  to  defend.  A  society 
that  knows  only  political  and  economic  aims  is 
injurious  to  that  simplicity,  and  creates,  as  we 
have  seen  during  the  nineteenth  century  with 
its  tragic  climax,  a  growing  sullen  discontent, 
a  blind  animosity,  a  feverish  jealousy.     Such 


EAST  AND  WEST  185 

a  society  sophisticates,  but  deadens  and  disap- 
points the  soul.  It  creates  millions  of  charac- 
terless beings,  whose  dullness  creeps  into  the 
institutions  they  labour  to  support ;  and  these, 
for  lack  of  sustaining  vitality,  crash  under  the 
strain  put  upon  them.  When  an  institution 
becomes  a  burden  to  the  people  for  whom  it 
has  been  evolved  it  must  be  destroyed,  and  it 
is  not  always  desirable  that  it  should  be  re,- 
placed.  There  is  always  the  possibility  that 
they  may  have  outgrown  the  need  for  it.  .  .  . 
It  certainly  looks  as  though  men  in  the  East 
had  long  outgrown  institutions  that  the  Occi- 
dentals are  still  bloodily  fighting  to  preserve. 
In  China,  at  any  rate,  men  have  achieved  what 
has  never  been  done  in  the  West,  save  by  a 
few  rare  individuals — that  simplicity,  through 
sophistication,  which  is  not  superhuman,  but 
is  simply  human  nature  released  from  its 
cramping  obsessions  and  perplexing  passions 
and  taking  the  integrity  of  the  soul  as  a  mat- 
ter of  course,  and  no  more  to  be  disputed  than 
the  act  of  breathing  or  seeing  or  loving.  A 
Chinese  poet  can  understand  liberty,  while  a 
Western  poet  can  only  be  lyrical  or  rhetorical 
about  it.  Between  the  two  there  is  the  dif- 
ference between  adolescence  and  manhood,  and 


186        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

that  is  the  diflference  that  has  to  be  spanned 
between  the  East  and  the  West.  The  boyish 
adventurers  of  Europe  have  lived  by  robbing 
the  world's  orchards,  lustily  imagining  that 
they  were  opening  up  Eldorado,  only  to  find 
that  there  are  men  in  the  East  who  know  more 
of  hfe  and  the  world  than  they,  without  even 
troubhng  to  cross  their  thresholds.  Discon- 
certing to  Western  ideas  though  the  simplicity 
of  the  peasant  and  the  savage  have  always 
been,  it  can  be  and  has  been  answered  with  the 
machine-gun,  but  that  is  a  sorry  weapon 
against  the  simplicity  of  sophistication,  which 
is  a  purely  aristocratic  state,  inimical  only  to 
vulgarity  and  mediocrity,  and  not  at  all  to 
the  spirit  of  democrac}\  Because  that  sim- 
plicity is  known  in  the  East  more  than  in  the 
West,  it  is  likely  that  democracy  will  be  estab- 
lished there  sooner  than  in  Europe  and  Amer- 
ica ;  because  the  issues  will  be  less  confused  and 
the  desirable  thing,  a  democracy  of  aristocrats, 
is  discernible  as  it  is  not  in  conditions  per- 
turbed by  w^ar,  revolution  and  industrial  feuds. 
In  a  time  of  stress  simplification  is  the  only 
outlet,  and  those  sun^ve  best  who  do  not  al- 
low any  idea  or  any  emotion  to  usurp  the  sov- 
ereignty of  the  soul.  They  alone  can  see  whith- 


EAST  AND  WEST  187 

er  they  are  going,  the  dangers  that  have  to  be 
met,  the  risks  that  must  be  taken,  and  they 
waste  no  energy  in  arguing  or  wranghng  or  in 
thwarting  others.  They  alone  can  recognise 
an  event  before  it  takes  shape  in  life,  and  are 
therefore  in  a  position  to  combine  with  their 
fellows  to  meet  it.  This  power  of  foresight 
and  combination  is  of  the  essence  of  policy, 
and  without  it  there  can  be  no  guidance:  but 
without  the  swift  logic  of  the  spirit  it  is  impos- 
sible. Even  intuition  is  not  enough,  for  with- 
out the  vision  the  logics  of  the  mind  and  the 
heart  are  without  premises,  they  can  reach  no 
precise  conclusions,  and  are  often  driven  into 
action  before  the  occasion  is  ripe  for  it  or  the 
probable  outcome  is  discernible.  The  wise 
man,  the  wise  nation,  knows  that  the  course 
of  events  is  decided  long  before  human  re- 
sponsibility arises,  and  that  nothing  can  alter 
it,  though  human  action  can  interfere  with  its 
effect  upon  human  affairs,  and  the  relations, 
happy  or  unhappy,  of  men  with  each  other  and 
with  the  rest  of  creation.  The  happiness  of 
men  and  women  depends  entirely  upon  the  de- 
gree of  their  understanding,  which  is  therefore 
the  only  thing  to  be  desired.  A  state  of  so- 
ciety which  stultifies  understanding  must  be 


188        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

amended,  or,  if  it  is  too  rigid  for  that,  then 
destroyed.  When  civilisation  is  perverted  and 
understanding  is  corrupt,  then  even  the  keen- 
est intelhgence  is  impotent  to  save  the  wretch- 
ed peoples  from  disaster.  To  this  is  attribut- 
able the  present  helplessness  of  the  European 
nations.  At  no  time  can  the  level  of  intelli- 
gence have  been  so  high,  knowledge  so  widely 
spread,  information  so  readily  available,  meth- 
ods of  communication  so  adequate,  and  yet  for 
lack  of  understanding  there  is  no  co-ordination 
of  these  advantages  or  power  to  turn  them  to 
the  use  of  all.  Russia,  on  the  threshold  of  in- 
dustrial civilisation,  refuses  to  enter  it  for  this 
reason.  Russia  cannot  divorce  herself  from 
the  East,  and  the  West  cannot  afford  to  aban- 
don her,  and  therefore  Russia  insists  that  in 
the  soul  of  her  race  East  and  West  shall  meet 
to  reconcile  the  simple,  inactive,  aristocratic 
spirit  with  the  seething  turbulent  spirit  of  de- 
mocracy. It  is  not  a  question  of  choosing  the 
always  ruinous  middle  way,  but  of  the  meeting 
of  extremes,  that  aristocracy  may  learn  its 
purpose,  and  democracy  the  meaning  of  the 
rights  it  clamours  for  so  vociferously  and  so 
vainly.  To  achieve  this  it  is  necessary  for  the 
European  races  to  admit  that  they  have  com- 


EAST  AND  WEST  189 

mon  interests  and  passions  higher  than  those 
of  war.  It  is  upon  this  that  Russia  is  insisting, 
asserting  her  will  and  vision  against  the  organ- 
ised military  and  economic  power  of  the  Allies 
in  whom  neither  will  nor  vision  appear.  Once 
more  in  an  acute  form  has  arisen  the  deadlock 
between  East  and  West  that  they  have  no 
common  terms  in  which  to  meet.  Will  can 
speak  to  will,  vision  can  signal  to  vision,  but 
what  has  will  to  say  to  economic  power,  and 
how  should  military  force  see  vision?  The 
West  calls  economic  and  military  organisa- 
tion democracy,  but  the  East  knows  that  it  is 
only  machinery,  more  than  half  of  which  is  un- 
necessary and  wasteful,  and  the  East,  through 
Russia,  demands  the  sacrifice  of  it  before  en- 
tering into  the  common  effort  for  the  deliver- 
ance of  humanity  from  the  scourges  that  now 
inflict  it.  With  railways  and  steamships  it 
should  be  easy  to  avert  famine ;  with  medicine 
and  scientific  hygiene  it  should  be  possible  to 
stamp  out  epidemic  plagues;  with  a  commun- 
al spirit  it  should  be  within  the  power  of  the 
present  generation  to  rid  the  world  of  war,  and 
the  East,  through  Russia,  calls  on  the  West  to 
co-operate.  If  the  barbarians  of  Europe  can 
learn  anything  at  all  they  should  have  learned 


190         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

it  by  now,  and  if  they  are  capable  of  consum- 
mating the  Revolution  begim  in  1789  they  can 
hardly  set  about  it  too  soon.  Unable  for  a 
century  to  find  spiritual  confidence  they  have 
accepted  material  security  as  a  stop-gap  only 
to  find  it  intolerable.  They  know. that  civil- 
isation is  possible,  that  it  has  been  achieved  by 
humanity,  for  the  soul  of  man  is  one  and  yields 
up  its  secrets  to  the  suffering,  and  they  know 
also  that  civilisation  is  not  an  end  but  a  means. 
To  regard  it  as  an  end  is  to  enthrone  medioc- 
rity, to  achieve  stagnation  and  through  that 
corruption.  France,  England,  Germany,  It- 
aly, America  have  all  achieved  the  stagnation 
of  mediocrity  which  Russia,  in  the  name  of  the 
East,  and  of  humanity,  refuses  to  accept,  be- 
cause it  is  a  worse  state  than  barbarism;  being, 
indeed,  barbarism  intensified  by  the  arts  of 
combination,  for  the  mediocre  in  their  insen- 
sible complacency  deny  the  only  two  real  vir- 
tues, the  simplicity  of  the  primitive  and  the 
simplicity  of  the  sophisticated,  and  abhor  logic 
of  any  kind,  preferring  to  drift  and  to  fight 
if  necessary  to  preserve  the  illusion  of  security 
they  have  set  up  as  their  sole  aim  and  end. 
That  illusion  is  the  chief  impediment  in  the 
way  of  the  healthy  growth  of  civilisation.  The 


EAST  AND  WEST  191 

Europeans  have  been  imprisoned  in  it  for  so 
long,  that  even  though  it  is  now  possible  for 
them  to  escape  from  it  they  cannot  seize  their 
opportunity;  and  when  they  use  phrases  like 
"making  the  world  safe  for  democracy"  can 
only  interpret  them  as  meaning  that  they  must 
admit  the  rest  of  humanity  to  their  prison, 
which  is  the  very  last  thing  that  the  rest  of 
humanity  desires.  It  is  true,  of  course,  that 
the  only  security  lies  in  democracy,  but  democ- 
racy is  a  far  greater  and  a  far  more  simple 
thing  than  the  economic  and  military  organ- 
isation which  the  Western  nations  are  pleased 
to  call  by  that  name.  Democracy  is  organised 
goodwill,  and  it  is  not  to  be  achieved  by  the 
methods  of  hatred,  jealousy,  cupidity  and  ex- 
ploitation. These  can  lead  to  the  success  of 
the  adventurous  and  the  bold  in  a  community, 
but  not  to  the  well-being  of  the  community, 
without  which  any  success  is  barren,  because, 
though  a  community  may  throw  up  great  men, 
they  can  do  nothing  if  they  are  urged  solely 
in  the  direction  of  economic  or  military  con- 
quest. Marcus  Aurelius  could  not  save  the 
Roman  Empire  from  decay. 

The  movements  which  restore  the  health  of 
humanity  come  from  the  people.     It  is  only 


192         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

after  a  generation  or  two  that  they  find  clear 
expression  in  great  men  whose  vision  is  to- 
wards the  next  great  movement.  There  is  a 
confused  migration,  an  interpenetration,  much 
suffering  and  great  tragedy  as  the  weak  are 
swallowed  up  in  the  effort  of  the  strong.  Lead- 
ers of  groups  appear  and  disappear,  groups 
form  and  break,  powers  burst  and  authorities 
crack  like  old  walls  against  the  pressure  of 
growing  trees.  For  a  while  men  can  live  on 
their  inheritance  from  the  past.  When  that  is 
exhausted  they  can  sustain  themselves  with  the 
intoxication  of  living  for  the  future,  but  in  the 
end  they  are  brought  to  the  inexorable  fact 
that  their  duty  is  to  the  present.  Then  slowly 
order  returns :  new  communities  are  formed  on 
the  ruins  of  the  old,  but  with  a  new  interfusion 
of  the  races  and  a  more  realistic  geographical 
sense.  The  people,  it  seems,  have  to  learn  in  a 
hard  practical  way  what  their  visionaries  have 
always  told  them.  The  generation  in  which 
such  a  movement  comes  learns  as  much  as  it 
can  digest  and  settles  down  to  work  and  brood 
on  its  lesson,  and  impatient  and  practical  peo- 
ple want  quick  results.  The  generations  are 
jealous  of  each  other,  and  one  cannot  to  an- 
other communicate  its  wisdom  directly;  but  all 


EAST  AND  WEST  193 

is  carried  on  the  deep  stream  of  humanity  from 
which  all  life  comes,  to  return  again  enriched 
by  consciousness.  It  is  idle,  then,  to  look  to 
any  system  of  government  for  social  perfec- 
tion. That  system  is  best  which  allows  the 
greatest  freedom  of  movement  to  the  human 
spirit.  The  Eastern  races  seem  to  have  learned 
that  long  ago,  but  the  wisdom  of  the  East  is 
only  just  beginning  to  dawn  upon  the  West, 
where  the  spirit  of  anarchy  has  again  and 
again  destroyed  tradition,  and  brought  ruin 
to  civilisations  that  imagined  themselves  to  be 
at  their  zem'th,  forgetful  that  the  barbarism 
most  to  be  dreaded  was  in  themselves.  A  civ- 
ilisation which  takes  too  much  from  the  work 
of  the  masses  who  sustain  it  without  giving 
them  the  due  return  of  slowly  increasing  lib- 
erty cannot  endure.  The  people  wither  away 
and  the  foundations  crumble.  No  amount  of 
material  wealth  can  then  stave  off  a  collapse. 
Very  pathetic,  then,  is  the  attempt  of  the 
great  nations  of  the  West  to  avert  disaster  by 
increasing  power  and  diminishing  hberty. 
Only  the  release  of  human  energy  can  restore 
the  vanished  health  of  the  people,  but  it  is  still 
proposed  to  waste  and  confine  that  energy  in 
mihtary  effort,  by  which  it  is  designed  to  ward 


,194         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

oflF  the  danger  threatened  from  visionary  Rus- 
sia. Behind  Russia  is  the  East,  where  affairs 
are  dominated  by  the  logic  of  the  spirit,  the 
very  instrument  that  is  needed  in  the  West. 
Because  Russia  will  not  and  cannot  relinquish 
it,  the  Russian  people  are  starving  and  suffer- 
ing the  agonies  of  civil  war.  They  need  also 
the  two  logics  evolved  in  the  West,  but,  view- 
ing the  West  with  clear-sighted  eyes,  they  can- 
not accept  them  as  sufficient;  and  also  as  this 
stupendous  drama  is  being  played  out  in  their 
souls  they  are  aware  of  their  responsibility  to 
humanity  and  will  not  betray  it,  preferring  to 
sink  into  the  very  pit  of  chaos,  and,  if  need 
be,  to  begin  again  at  the  beginning.  No  race 
can  accept  as  right  the  grim  grey  dullness  and 
uniformity  of  the  British  proletariat.  No  race 
in  the  name  of  humanity  can  admit  that  such 
is  the  just  and  inevitable  price  of  industrial- 
ism. Revolution  in  Russia  and  Germany  is 
the  assertion  of  that  truth.  Let  us  be  clear 
about  that.  The  revolution  in  Eastern  Eu- 
rope is  not  merely  a  political  upheaval  and  a 
reorganisation  of  the  communities  of  the  three 
Emperors,  it  is  an  emphatic  repudiation  of  the 
materialism  of  the  West,  a  protest  against  the 
formation  of  the  single  community  necessitat- 


EAST  AND  WEST  195 

ed  by  the  machinery  of  modern  commerce  to 
be  dominated  by  commercial  calculations,  and 
a  vehement  declaration  that  life  for  the  com- 
munity as  for  the  individual  begins  where  com- 
merce ends. 

The  human  spirit  may  for  a  time  seem  im- 
potent against  the  economic  power  of  the  "Big 
Five,"  with  their  control  of  raw  materials,  but 
that  power  maintains  its  monopoly  at  the  cost 
of  repudiating  both  the  aristocratic  and  the 
democratic  impulses  of  that  spirit  which  in 
consequence  does  not  enter  into  its  operations 
at  all,  and  without  it  they  achieve  nothing  but 
a  fevered  movement  without  direction  or  pur- 
pose. The  British  attempt  to  compromise  at 
material  security  has  led  only  to  an  upheaval 
of  those  very  forces  of  barbarism  and  crude 
appetite  which  it  sought  to  avoid.  At  the  same 
time  the  compromise  has  given  men  certain 
powers  over  the  old  limitations  of  existence, 
without  which  the  single  community  cannot 
become  an  actuality  to  the  human  conscious- 
ness. Community  of  material  interests  leads 
to  spiritual  interpenetration,  which  by  diver- 
gence of  such  interests  is  distracted  and  im- 
peded. The  blunder  that  is  being  committed 
lies  in  imagining  that  the  single  community  has 


196         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

to  be  created.  It  exists.  It  has  always  ex- 
isted. The  sufferings  of  men  have  arisen  from 
the  refusal  of  the  component  communities  to 
acknowledge  it,  and  that  refusal  has  arisen 
largely  from  the  lack  of  effective  means  of 
communication.  Those  have  been  estabhshed, 
but  so  ingrained  is  the  piratical  habit  of  the 
powerful  among  men  that  they  have  been 
seized  as  a  means  of  holding  recalcitrant  com- 
munities to  ransom.  Individuals  in  the  mod- 
ern world  are  practically  immune  from  rob- 
bery, because  it  is  so  much  easier  to  plunder 
communities.  This  can  be  done  with  impu- 
nity, because  it  is  authorised  by  the  laws  made 
and  handed  do\^Ti  by  the  robbers  of  old  times. 
The  Big  Five  in  the  League  of  Nations  are 
simply  holding  up  the  rest  of  the  world,  par- 
ticularly the  East,  to  force  it  to  accept  unmiti- 
gated industrialism.  The  answer  of  the  re- 
maining communities  is  democracy,  for  which 
they,  having  long  passed  the  elementary  stage 
in  which  conmiercial  adventure  seems  the  high- 
est possible  advance  on  piracy,  are  ripe.  All 
the  world  except  the  Big  Five  is  ready  to  ad- 
mit the  existence  of  the  single  community.  The 
Big  Five,  confused  with  war  and  w^arlike  con- 
ceptions, vainly  imagine  that  the  single  com- 


EAST  AND  WEST  197 

munity  is  waiting  for  them  to  create  it.  The 
Big  Five  are  against,  the  rest  of  the  world  is 
for,  humanity.  In  the  long  run  that  which  is 
prevails  against  that  which,  however  splendid- 
ly, appears  to  be. 


X 

DEMOCRACY 


X 

DEMOCRACY 

Democracy  is  not  a  form  of  government, 
it  is  government.  Every  other  system  is  either 
a  tyranny  or  a  veiled  form  of  anarchy.  Only 
under  democracy  can  the  realities  of  existence 
be  dealt  with  and  turned  to  the  service  of  man- 
kind. Every  other  attempted  government 
must  deal  with  illusions.  Admitting  that  gov- 
ernment depends  upon  discipline,  the  only  true 
discipline  is  self-discipline.  If  the  possibility 
of  that  be  removed,  whatever  appearance  may 
be  maintained,  beneath  it  there  can  only  be 
chaos. 

A  traveller  journeying  through  that  coun- 
try which  is  most  proud  of  being  democratic, 
Great  Britain,  would  perceive  the  impossibil- 
ity of  acknowledging  the  claim  as  he  saw  the 
huddled  streets  and  houses  in  which  for  the 
most  part  the  people  live.  He  would  know 
the  impossibility  of  self -discipline  in  people 
denied  beauty,  air,  health,  privacy,  social  in- 

201 


202        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

tercourse,  civic  pride;  and  condemned  from 
week  to  week  to  a  monotony  of  toil  by  which 
they  are  drilled  into  the  uniformity  of  sub- 
servience. Much  the  same  impression  would 
be  given  one  who  should  journey  round  the 
environs  of  Paris  or  take  a  trip  by  train  across 
the  industrial  area  of  Belgium.  What  Ver- 
haeren  called  the  tentacular  town  sucks  men 
in  from  the  earth,  gives  them  a  new  conscious- 
ness, but  robs  them  of  the  vitaUty  to  use  it; 
and  government  in  the  West  depends  entirely 
upon  the  linking  up  of  these  tentacular  towns 
and  the  reduction  of  their  populations  to  uni- 
formity, so  that  they  will  in  blind  obedience 
acquiesce  in  the  operations  of  those  who,  by 
intrigue,  have  gained  control  of  the  machinery 
of  communication.  A  man  lunching  in  the 
Midland  Hotel,  Manchester,  or  the  Carlton 
at  Johannesburg,  can  perceive  no  essential 
difference  in  his  surroundings,  and  it  makes  no 
difference  to  him  whether  he  buys  furniture 
from  Maple's  in  Tottenham  Court  Road  or 
Maple's  in  Buenos  Aires.  Poor  man  or  rich, 
white,  yellow,  brown  or  black,  whatever  en- 
ergy he  puts  forth  contributes  to  the  growth 
of  the  tentacular  towns  and  accelerates  the 
means  of  communication  between  them.     So 


DEMOCRACY  203 

far  as  the  exchange  of  commodities  is  con- 
cerned internationalisation  is  complete,  and  it 
is  characterless  because  it  has  been  hastily  ac- 
complished at  the  cost  of  devitalising  the  pro- 
letariat. The  invading  Germans  destroyed 
the  Cloth  Hall  at  Ypres,  but  they  left  intact 
the  tentacular  town  of  Lille. 

There  will  be,  there  almost  is,  a  world-chain 
of  such  towns,  providing  a  method  so  vastly 
more  expeditious  of  exchanging  commodities 
and  transferring  work  from  one  community  to 
another  that  all  others  are  demoded.  What, 
then,  was  it  that  necessitated  the  sacrifice  of 
so  many  milUons  of  lives  and  the  collapse  of 
the  greater  part  of  Europe  into  famine  and 
anarchy?  Partly  the  discomfort  of  being  de- 
prived of  old  traditions,  partly  inabihty  to 
shake  off  the  remnants  of  patriarchal  concep- 
tions, but  chiefly  the  mental  confusion  which 
imagined  democracy  to  be  a  matter  of  the  bal- 
lot, a  purely  political  thing  which  admitted 
some  element  of  reason  into  human  affairs,  but 
denied  the  operation  of  the  conscience.  The 
pressure  of  the  industrial  upon  the  political 
centres  of  the  world  had  become  intolerable, 
and  the  close  bureaucratic  power  of  London, 
Paris  and  Beriin  had  to  be  broken.    To  save 


204         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

themselves  they  opened  the  sluice-gates  and 
let  the  industrial  forces  of  Europe  spend  them- 
selves in  the  wasteful  effort  of  the  war.  Ber- 
lin, with  its  alcove  St.  Petersburg,  has  been 
swept  away,  but  London  and  Paris,  linked 
now  with  New  York,  remain.  The  industrial 
centres  will  once  more  gather  up  their  forces, 
only  to  have  them  checked  and  impeded  by  the 
new  political  group,  which  refuses  to  admit 
that  democracy  is  more  than  a  political  system. 
To  the  pressure  of  steam  power  has  been  add- 
ed that  of  electricity  and  oil,  but  the  political 
group,  as  insensible  to  industrial  pressure  as 
to  any  kind  of  spiritual  vision,  takes  the  vic- 
tory over  Berlin  as  evidence  of  the  Tightness 
of  its  attitude,  and  refuses  to  amend  or  jetti- 
son a  single  one  of  its  ideas.  But  the  collapse 
of  Berlin  and  St.  Petersburg  is  not  the  victory 
of  Paris,  London  and  New  York,  it  is  the  vic- 
tory of  industrialism  fighting  for  democracy, 
and  the  first  to  reap  its  fruits  will  be  the  Ger- 
mans and  the  Russians,  who  will  become  rec- 
onciled to  the  spirit  of  the  East,  while  the 
Allied  Nations  will  be  still  sullenly  insurgent 
against  political  tyranny,  wasting  their  efforts 
in  the  maintenance  of  armaments  to  defend 
ideas  which  have  lost  their  validity.     The  re- 


DEMOCRACY  205 

moval  of  Berlin  by  itself  means  an  immense 
saving  of  money  to  the  German  people  and  a 
vast  gain  in  responsibility  for  their  industrial 
centres,  already  far  in  advance  of  the  British 
in  self-government.  If  the  world-community 
is  to  take  shape  in  a  series  of  tentacular  towns 
linked  together  with  railways,  roads  and  air- 
routes,  its  health  must  depend  upon  the  ease 
with  which  those  towns  can  co-operate  and 
respond  to  each  others'  needs.  Administra- 
tive areas  then  will  be  determined  by  geogra- 
phy and  not  by  race,  by  railways  and  ports 
and  not  by  strategic  considerations.  Military 
ideas  are  maintained  in  London,  Paris  and 
New  York  (and  possibly  in  Tokyo)  entirely 
to  serve  the  vested  interests  that  have  grown 
up  round  them,  but  the  great  industrial  cen- 
tres are  of  far  more  importance  to  society  than 
the  capitals,  and  these  military  ideas  have  lost 
their  roots.  The  ideas  that  shall  replace  them 
have  hardly  begun  to  show  above  the  surface, 
and  the  unhappy  masses  of  humanity  huddled 
together  in  the  towns  can  only  move  by  in- 
stinct, which  at  present  bids  them  to  go  on 
working  if  only  to  avoid  thinking.  How,  lack- 
ing ideas,  can  they  think?  They  can  only  keep 
the  machines  running  and  trust  to  collective 


toe        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

impulse  to  keep  them  from  an  insane  revolt 
and  a  ruinous  breach  in  the  circulation  of  work 
upon  which  their  lives  depend.     They  know 
the  vastness  of  the  power  they  have  created, 
and  they  know  the  feebleness  of  the  hands  in 
which  it  rests.    They  know,  too,  that  they  must 
take  the  control  into  their  own  hands.    But  to 
do  that  they  must  have  a  common  centre,  a 
common  law  which  all  will  obey,  and  a  respon- 
sible executive.     Rights  and  privileges  from 
top  to  bottom  of  society  must  conform  to  du- 
ties, but  to  achieve  all  the  nice  adjustments 
necessary  there  must  be  rest  from  the  daily 
drudgery  of  tending  the  machine,  and  there 
must  be  relief  from  the  pressure  of  the  tentac- 
ular toHTis,  which  must  be  rebuilt  to  let  in  air, 
the  healing  and  creative  work  of  Nature,  beau- 
ty, form  and  proportion.    The  linking  togeth- 
er of  the  towns  gives  the  power  and  the  wealth 
to  remedy  their  disastrous  influence,  but  it  is 
taken  and  frittered  away  by  the  political  cen- 
tres maintaining  useless  and  injurious  forms 
of  government,  though  the  proletariat  of  the 
world  knows  in  its  heart  that  there  are  no  forms 
of  government,  that  there  is  only  Government, 
and   that   Government   is    democracy,   which 
alone  admits  of  the  application  of  the  aristo- 


DEMOCRACY  207 

cratic  principle,  the  rule  of  the  best;  for  only 
democracy  can  liberate  conscience,  the  power 
to  choose  between  good  and  evil,  and  of  the 
good  to  choose  the  best.  Government  in  the 
past  has  depended  upon  the  obliteration  of 
conscience,  either  through  open  slavery,  or  by 
the  threat  of  poverty,  or  in  the  rudimentary 
stage  of  industrialism  by  State  education, 
which  substitutes  rough-and-ready  instruction 
in  certain  ideas  and  conduct  for  the  delicate 
process  of  nurturing  the  minds  of  children 
through  the  difficult  years  of  the  ripening  of 
conscience.  The  rudimentary  stages  of  indus- 
trialism are  long  past.  The  system  can  now 
be  assimilated  by  a  community  without  paying 
the  heavy  price  that  the  Europeans  have  paid 
for  it.  The  economic  restoration  of  the  devas- 
tated countries  is  a  comparatively  simple  mat- 
ter. The  terrible  problem  is  how  to  repair  the 
poverty  of  spirit  of  the  leaders  in  industrial- 
ism. Must  they,  too,  be  brought  to  ruin  be- 
fore they  can  understand?  Inertia,  stagna- 
tion, indifference,  are  deadlier  than  famine  and 
pestilence.  When  neither  joy  nor  suffering 
can  stir  the  hearts  of  the  people  the  spirit  can- 
not move  among  them,  and  their  days  are  sep- 
arate one  from  another,  their  lives  are  isolated 


«08        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

and  nothing  can  unite  them.  They  are  im- 
pervious to  the  achievement  of  the  past  and 
can  hand  on  nothing  to  the  future.  They  re- 
main dull,  stationary,  parasitic  upon  human- 
ity, which  at  last  discards  them  and  their 
works. 

Democracy  is  government  by  faith,  and  for 
lack  of  faith  it  is  not  attempted,  though  the 
state  of  the  world,  even  the  physical  discom- 
fort of  the  people,  cry  out  that  it  should  be  ad- 
mitted. Trotsky  at  Brest-Litovsk,  Eisner  at 
Berne,  Wilson  in  Paris,  have  all  laid  it  down 
as  the  inevitable  form  of  society  to  which  the 
nations  must  submit;  but  unhappily  France, 
England  and  America,  all  communities  suf- 
fering under  the  tyranny  of  economic  power, 
believe  themselves  to  be  democratic,  and,  in- 
dignant that  other  conmiunities  do  not  see  eye 
to  eye  with  them,  denounce  them  as  anarchic, 
refuse  to  treat  with  them,  starve  them,  deprive 
them  of  trade  and  the  opportunity  of  trading. 
It  is  precisely  their  use  of  economic  power 
that  proves  them  undemocratic,  but  to  this  they 
are  blind.  Their  spokesmen  are  eloquent  in 
praise  of  democracy,  but  quahfy  it  with  na- 
tionalism. But  qualified  democracy  is  noth- 
ing.   As  well  speak  of  qualified  poetry.    The 


DEMOCRACY  «09 

spirit  of  democracy,  like  that  of  poetry,  can  be 
coloured  but  not  confined  by  nationality. 

The  pohticians  of  the  victorious  Allies  are 
like  a  man  standing  on  his  hose-pipe  and  curs- 
ing everybody  in  his  garden  because  no  water 
is  forthcoming.  It  is  his  own  foot  that  wants 
removing. 

Unfortunately,  however,  the  greater  the 
urgency  of  the  need  for  admitting  that  a 
change  has  come  about,  the  stiffer  the  obstin- 
acy with  which  it  is  refused.  The  fight  of  the 
manufacturers  against  the  landed  aristocracy 
is  a  small  thing  compared  with  that  of  the  pro- 
letariat against  the  manufacturers  clinging  to 
the  antiquated  methods  of  government  of  the 
aristocracy.  Such  methods  are  lavish  and 
recklessly  expensive,  and  the  proletariat  very 
properly  wants  to  know  why  the  laws  of  econ- 
omy should  not  apply  to  them,  since  their  im- 
munity makes  those  laws  too  stringent  in  their 
application  to  domestic  life.  The  manufactur- 
ers also  wanted  to  know  this  while  they  were 
fighting,  but  directly  the  fight  was  over  they 
adopted  for  their  business  corporations  the 
immorality  which  had  been  the  privilege  of  the 
powerful  political  combinations  which  con- 
ducted, or  misconducted,  the  affairs  of  human- 


210         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

ity.  Uncontrolled  power  is  corrosive,  and  it 
has  been  proved  by  bitter  experience  that  po- 
litical control  by  means  of  the  vote  does  not 
provide  a  sufficient  check,  and  indeed  has  only 
aggravated  power  by  making  it  possible  for 
rulers  to  throw  responsibility  on  to  the  ruled. 
Acting  only  through  political  machinery,  pub- 
lic opinion  cannot  be  brought  into  operation 
swiftly  enough,  because  without  connecting 
machinery  the  minds  of  the  people  cannot  link 
political  cause  with  industrial  and  domestic 
eflFect.  They  realise  the  connection  in  time, 
but  always  too  late.  Parliamentary  institu- 
tions could  exercise  some  control  over  the  eco- 
nomic power  of  a  landed  aristocracy,  but  with- 
out democratic  control  in  industry  they  are  im- 
potent in  the  face  of  that  of  manufacturers 
and  undertakers,  who,  operating  internation- 
ally, can  present  a  national  Parliament  with 
an  accomplished  fact  and  leave  it  to  placate  its 
electors  as  best  it  can.  An  international  Par- 
liament is  now  a  necessity,  but  by  itself  can 
only  aggravate  the  evils  of  the  capitalistic  sys- 
tem. It  can  only  function  properly  if  it  is 
made  democratic  by  devolution  and  the  fusion 
of  political  and  industrial  institutions.  Other- 
wise the  increasing  pressure  of  industrialism. 


DEMOCRACY  211 

acting  as  a  blind  and  undirected  force,  will 
crash  its  way  through  to  achieve  in  the  end 
hideously  and  destructively  what  might  be  ac- 
complished patiently  with  foresight  and  en- 
thusiasm— the  reconstruction  of  society  to  con- 
form outwardly  to  what  in  essence  it  is: 
Democracy. 

There  is  much  of  the  past  that  it  is  desirable 
to  preserve — the  slowly  developed  instinctive 
observance  of  order, 'the  social  sense,  care  for 
good  manners,  traditions  of  scholarship  and  ur- 
banity. Refusal  to  yield  to  the  pressure  of 
industrialism  and  the  crying  needs  of  the  pro- 
letariat can  only  mean  the  destruction  of  the 
good  with  the  bad  and  the  reduction  of  society 
to  the  bare  machinery  of  existence,  a  means  of 
providing  food,  clothes  and  shelter.  But  hu- 
manity is  so  constituted  that  without  the  qual- 
ity of  ecstasy  it  cannot  even  fulfil  efficiently 
its  rudimentary  functions.  Ecstasy  is  the  mov- 
ing force  of  evolution,  the  breaking  of  the 
chrysalis  into  the  butterfly.  Without  it  life  is 
aimless  and  intolerably  hideous.  In  the  dead- 
lock that  has  arisen  between  political  and  in- 
dustrial institutions  human  beings  everywhere 
are  being  starved  of  ecstasy.  The  dragging 
misery  of  life  creates  in  every  individual  a  hard 


«12        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

shell  that  makes  him  impervious  to  every  oth- 
er. Ecstasy  lives  in  the  soul  of  humanity,  but 
not  in  the  single  separate  soul  of  the  individual 
to  whom  it  is  communicated  through  the  love 
of  his  fellows.  It  is  the  creeping  tragedy  of 
modern  life  that  the  powers  of  love  in  men  and 
women  are  denied  their  sustenance  from  the 
soul  of  humanity,  because  they  are  cramped 
and  stifled  in  communities  engaged  in  a  deadly 
and  futile  rivalry  that  ends  in  mutual  destruc- 
tion, when  they  should  be  joined  together  in 
the  sole  aim  of  achieving  mutual  elevation. 

Change  is  so  slow  as  to  be  hardly  percept- 
ible, but  there  are  times  when  its  accumulated 
effect  has  to  be  admitted  and  dealt  with  con- 
sciously. Slow  though  change  may  be,  it  is 
swifter  than  the  minds  of  men  who  invent 
tools,  engines  and  social  machinery  to  over- 
take it  and  never  quite  succeed.  Increasing 
consciousness  of  change  has  produced  a  frenzy 
of  invention,  and  still  men  lag  behind  because 
they  have  not  yet  learned  that  the  world  they 
live  in  is  a  spiritual  structure,  a  soul  in  which 
an  infinite  number  of  souls  are  built  together, 
that  life  and  death  are  but  architectonic  prin- 
ciples, and  that  the  great  building  of  the  soul 
is  contained  in  and  inspired  with  infinite  love. 


DEMOCRACY  213 

In  this  great  building,  blind  to  its  majestic 
beauty,  they  huddle  into  corners,  creep  away 
from  the  light,  defile  and  abuse  themselves  and 
each  other,  and  every  now  and  then  bring 
themselves  to  such  a  pitch  of  misery  that  they 
must  move,  must  come  into  the  light,  must  see 
the  light  in  each  other's  eyes,  and  thereby 
something  of  the  beauty  amid  which  they  are 
privileged  to  dwell.  They  perceive  form  and 
colour,  and  they  desire  them  above  all  things 
for  the  ecstasy  they  bring,  and  in  that  ecstasy 
a  new  age  is  born.  The  remnants  of  the  old 
are  cast  away,  and  for  a  space  they  can  live 
freely  in  accordance  with  perceived  design: 
the  various  elements  of  their  existence  fall  into 
their  places  and  are  locked  together  to  give 
them  the  energy  with  which  to  live,  and  to  ex- 
plore the  soul  of  humanity  from  which  comes 
wealth  indivisible  and  inexhaustible. 

Love  in  this  differs  from  gold  and  clay 
That  to  divide  is  not  to  take  away. 

The  great  effort  of  the  early  years  of  the 
nineteenth  century  was  not  in  vain,  though  for 
so  long  it  has  seemed  to  be  thwarted  into  ster- 
ility. The  practical  sense  of  humanity,  know- 
ing what  rare  treasure  was  unearthed,  set 
about  to  reorganise  society,  that  this  treasure 


214         THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

might  admit  ecstasy  to  the  life  of  every  day 
when  at  last  drudgery  could  be  kindled  into 
work. 

For  that  it  was  necessary  to  break  down  bar- 
riers, the  beaver-dams  that  men  had  built 
against  the  rich  waters  of  the  creative  will;  it 
was  necessary  to  destroy  old  faiths,  old  sys- 
tems, immemorial  habits.  Men  became  a  race 
of  rodents,  gnawing  away  until  the  house  they 
dwelt  in  came  tumbling  about  their  ears.  It 
was  necessary  for  them  to  be  banded  together 
in  a  stern  monotony  of  toil ;  but  it  is  necessary 
no  longer,  because  the  destructive  labours  to 
which  they  were  committed  are  at  an  end, 
ceased  indeed  a  generation  ago.  Destruction 
is  best  wrought  in  separation:  for  it  is  grim 
work,  only  to  be  wrought  with  a  fixed  will, 
holding  in  abeyance  the  fluid  and  infinitely 
supple  creative  will  of  humanity.  For  men 
living  as  they  should  there  should  never  be  any 
necessity  for  a  will  so  fixed.  It  is  forced  on 
them  by  the  indolence  of  the  generations,  for 
when  the  creative  will  is  admitted  to  human 
activity  it  brings  destruction  with  its  creation 
exactly  as  it  does  in  Nature.  In  the  long  pro- 
cess of  sophistication  men  lose  the  wisdom  that 
they  share  with  birds  and  beasts  and  trees. 


DEMOCRACY  gl5 

They  cannot  rest  content  with  unconscious 
wisdom,  for  it  brings  no  sufficient  ecstasy.  Men 
must  be  conscious. 

At  long  last  and  after  generations  of  trag- 
edy they  have  achieved  that.  The  revelation 
of  its  possibility  passes  from  soul  to  soul,  East 
and  West,  and  to  make  ready  for  it  the  great 
common  life  of  democracy  is  prepared.  So- 
ciety is  explored,  understood,  charted  exactly 
as  the  earth  has  been:  its  barriers  and  checks 
and  injurious  controls  are  removed,  and  con- 
scious men  everywhere  begin  to  demand  the 
right  to  exercise  their  conscience  in  everything 
they  do,  in  their  public  and  in  their  private 
lives,  that  the  ecstasy  without  which  life  is  a 
bitter  confinement  of  the  spirit  may  freely 
move  from  soul  to  soul,  and  from  heart  to 
heart. 

No  power,  no  interest,  can  resist  this  grow- 
ing impulse  which  will  have  society  reconsti- 
tuted in  accordance  with  its  structure  and  with 
universal  law.  The  petty  laws  of  expediency 
of  the  various  communities  that  have  been  and 
are  so  reluctant  to  relinquish  their  selfishness 
will  break  before  it  like  ice  in  the  spring  thaw; 
for  this  impulse  has  given  men  a  new  knowl- 
edge.    The  scientific  discovery  of  fact  is  not 


«16        THE  ANATOMY  OF  SOCIETY 

enough  for  them.  They  know  now  that  no 
fact  is  discovered  until  it  shines  as  a  symbol, 
and  except  with  shining  symbols  they  will  not 
build.  It  is  for  this  that  the  grey-faced  pro- 
letariat is  waiting.  Unscrupulous  men  may 
act  on  dull  and  unrelated  facts  to  their  appar- 
ent profit  and  real  hurt,  but  men  in  the  mass 
can  only  move,  can  only  act  under  inspiration. 
They  have  now  the  impulse  towards  democ- 
racy, but  no  vision  of  it,  because  democracy 
can  only  be  won  by  men  when  Man  to  them 
becomes  a  symbol  of  the  God  who  lives  in  every 
moment  of  life.  Man  for  men  is  the  key  sym- 
bol, the  solvent  of  the  facts  that  have  been 
unearthed  by  science.  With  the  use  of  that 
symbol  facts  can  be  related,  and  their  validity 
can  be  tested.  Those  that  shine  as  symbols  can 
be  used  for  action,  while  those  that  remain 
dead  and  dull  can  be  rejected  as  half-truths  or 
mistaken  conclusions.  Man,  with  all  his  varied 
powers,  his  desires,  passions  and  the  three  log- 
ics of  his  being,  spirit,  mind  and  heart,  is  a 
democracy  governed  by  the  aristocratic  prin- 
ciple, his  conscience,  which  selects  his  best  and 
noblest,  and  keys  his  forces  and  capacities  up 
to  that,  and  in  the  fullness  of  time  Man  can- 
not but  make  Society  in  his  own  image. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 

Return  to  desk  from  which  borrowed. 
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